A small school in southern Minnesota, strapped for funds and needing new math books and a fresh curriculum, flipped its classrooms and raised achievement and student engagement. The math teachers led and implemented the changes. Upon reflection, they found 10 good reasons educators should consider flipping their classroom. Among the most…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) House Committee Passes Education Reform Legislation: On Party-Line Votes, Committee Passes Accountability and Teacher…

As Internet technology encroached on the public school classroom about a decade ago, Kim Ross, superintendent of the Houston School District in Houston, Minnesota, saw an opportunity. At first, he and his administrative team simply wanted to offer students in the district of 1,300 access to more classes via the web than what a district that size…

More than $20 billion a year currently is being spent to construct public schools. Hundreds of billions are being spent to carry out public education. Everyone wants the best possible use of that money. Families want safe, nurturing, challenging, and effective schools for their children. Community members and policy-makers want schools to be…

Assisted by a sophisticated telecommunications system, 90 small, rural Minnesota schools collaborated to influence state legislation regarding funding equity and other issues. Small-school strategies for building political activism include seizing available opportunities, developing leadership capacity, involving political constituents,…

Supported by its local school board and unimpeded by innovation-blocking rules and regulations, the Minnesota New Country Charter School launched a nationally recognized program featuring a course-free structure, individualized learning, and an emphasis on technology. This charter school has helped stimulate improvements in the other district…

Minnesota has enacted legislation and implemented cooperative services to meet student needs. Legislation allows two or more districts to cooperate on programs and services while maintaining local boards and independent school district status. Communicasting, combining elements of communication and broadcasting, enables school districts to share…

This report examines educational expenditures for all Minnesota public schools for the 1997-98 school year and finds that the cost of educating children in smaller schools was higher than in larger schools. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate that a more precise relationship between enrollment and expenditures is log-linear, rather than…

Seventy percent of the public schools in Southwest and West Central Minnesota voluntarily participated in a study of class size and course offerings available during the 1979-1980 school year for grades 10-12. Vocational education and special education courses were not included in the study because of their cooperative nature. The size of classes…

This policy brief summarizes the full report [ED468840], which describes a study that evaluated whether smaller school districts, as a result of their higher costs per pupil, experienced greater hardship in the areas of infrastructure, resources, and staffing. The policy brief reports on the results of a survey that was administered to the…

A survey of representative schools in Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois showed that most small and rural schools house middle-level students in buildings primarily designed for elementary or high school students. Middle level students often receive an inappropriate educational program that is not taught by teachers trained to understand and…

To help in providing high quality school programs in rural communities which do not generate adequate revenue dollars, a model of sharing and pairing services between schools is being used in southeastern Minnesota. The cooperation model, which includes four small districts, consists of eight or nine basic programs which are coordinated by a…

After summarizing the current literature regarding potential school organizational structures and practices, this report outlined the process that was developed and utilized by four small rural school districts in southern Minnesota in 1980. Emphasis was on maintaining local school districts which cooperated with other schools through an…

A political writer presents the case for maintaining small schools in Minnesota and not entering into drastic consolidation of school districts as recommended by the Domian Report. Small School superintendents' replies to a survey, results of educational studies and reports, the work of small school projects, and quotations from prominent…

Designated as Phase I of a larger follow-up study of high school graduates, the report presented a comparison of students' scores on the Minnesota Scholastic Aptitude Test (MSAT) by school size. The population for the study consisted of all high school juniors attending public high schools in Minnesota who had taken the MSAT during the 1966-67…