Cara Jackson on what environmental factors matter most to new teachers. Mia Howard on growing a charter network to multi-site.
Chad Aldeman on why failing to account for attrition is a misleading way to analyze pensions – and masks the bad deal a lot of teachers are getting from their pension plans. This sounds arcane but is really central to the discussion about teacher retirement.
If there is a teacher strike we’ve got fiscal context. Here’s Max Marchitello looking at the situation in Oakland.
Online charter school politics.
Lauren Camera thinks Cory Booker has a DeVos problem.
Your periodic reminder that for all the hand-wringing about TFA as Trojan Horse for left wing politics they are also dealing with this stuff, too. Hope they can keep a good sense of humor about it.
What’s in a name? There is a company that provides transportation to parents as an alternative to other arrangements, think more or less background-checked Uber. Yet for some reason they decided to call themselves “Mustard.” A recent email blast from the founder noted that the name didn’t really connect with parents, so after working with some brand consultants they’ve changed it to Hugo. OK. A few thoughts:
First, if all it takes to be a brand consultant is saying things like, “Hey, Mustard is a really lousy name for a school transportation company, that won’t connect with parents and will confuse everyone” and then presumably upselling them to advice about staying away from all condiment names, I guess being a brand consultant is not nearly as challenging as I had assumed.
Second, good agility.
Third, that agility will come in handy because while there are clearly a few underserved markets here and some opportunities around special education and other niche services for school districts companies have struggled to get traction. School district transportation is not going to be replaced by Uber and Lyft anytime soon (that’s not even a great idea) but there are probably some good opportunities at the margins and given the costs around school transpiration the margins aren’t too shabby Get it..Also some ways to serve parents more directly. It’s an interesting emerging market. Anyway, if you want to learn more about school transportation we made a video:
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