Last week, the Daily Journal ran a six-day package of stories on the issue of teacher quality and the need for Mississippi to attract more of its best and brightest residents to be classroom teachers. The package is part of the “State of Our Schools” a year-long look at Mississippi’s education system and its challenges [...]

Today we began the third installment of the Daily Journal’s year-long State of Our Schools series. The entire series can be found here. During my reporting for this week’s series, I spoke with former State Superintendent of Education Tom Burnham, who now leads the Principal Corps program based at the University of Mississippi. Much information [...]

Bobby Harrison reports in today’s Daily Journal that “Most area legislators want charters limited” The story is a great comprehensive survey of the local delegation’s thoughts about the charter school issue that is expected to dominate the legislative debate in the current session. Bobby interviewed 20 Northeast Mississippi legislators during the first week of the [...]

There was  great report on Friday by Sarah Carr of The Hechinger Report about the racial divide in Mississippi’s charter school debate. “Mississippi debate over charters, school reform evokes broader racial divide” I highly recommend reading it to understand another nuance of what is expected to be the most hotly-contested issue of the current session. [...]

Not much happened in education reform during the Mississippi Legislature’s first week in session, this past week. Expect that to change soon. Both the House and Senate are expected to debate a bill that would expand charter schools in the state and to consider a “third-gate” proposal that would not allow third-graders who failed the [...]

In today’s Daily Journal, we had the second installment of our State of Our Schools series, examining the Florida education reform model being studied by Mississippi’s Legislature as a possible example of the Magnolia State. Links to those stories and the first installment of the series is available at here. Here are some links to [...]

Today, we continued the State of Our Schools series with Daily Journal Capitol reporter Bobby Harrison writing about education actions by state government in the years since the 1982 Education Reform Act. Among his stories is a great explanation of the MAEP formula designed to fund the state’s schools and how it works. It does [...]

Along with the stories from the State of Our Schools series in today’s Daily Journal, we also had quotes from several current and former state and education leaders about the legacy of the Education Reform Act 30 years later. The act, which was passed by the Legislature on Dec. 20, 1982, in a special legislative [...]

(NOTE: The State of Our Schools series has a new landing page: http://educationmatters.djournal.com/state-of-our-school/ This post contains links for all of December’s stories) Today, we ran the first installment in what will be an ongoing Daily Journal series about Mississippi’s public schools, their performance and the factors that affect it, and the policy debate over how [...]