On July 5, T he Answer S heet published a post I wrote about the Relay Graduate School of Education. That began a lively discussion about the Relay School, and the teaching techniques demonstrated in a video entitled “Rigorous Classroom Discussion” (Relay subsequently renamed the video “A Culture of Support”), says Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York, for the Washington Post.  The discussion moved to Diane Ravitch’s blog with readers weighing in on whether charter school teacher training programs should be authorized to grant graduate degrees. During the course of that discussion, I learned that the Relay Graduate School of Education is not the only charter school-based graduate program. This past spring, a similar degree-granting program opened in Boston, which Diane Ravitch wrote about here . Its name is Match and it awards a master’s degree through the newly formed Sposato Graduate School of Education. Like Relay, it is a two-year program subsidized by charter schools and venture philanthropies. Its faculty members are not researchers or scholars but rather charter school teachers or leaders. Similar to Relay, many of its courses are online. Match looks to Relay and Teach for America as models and has a collaborative relationship with Harvard’s “Ed Labs.”

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