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Reformist Tide Rises for Alabama Schools
Alabama this year has been the locus of two major battles over education policy, both with national implications. These fights merit close attention.
First, in what even strong supporters of school choice (myself included) acknowledged was a sneak attack on February 28, the state legislature’s Republican leadership suddenly substituted in conference… |
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Conservatives Should Embrace Charter Schools
If conservatives are looking for a new way to sell the movement’s opportunity message to more people, embracing charter schools as a civil rights issue is both good policy and good politics.
Fed up with a low-performing public school, parents at 24th Street Elementary in Los Angeles decided to replace the administration and teachers, and… |
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Louisiana Education Reform: Making Government Work “Public Service” Once More
Underneath the fights that have raged in recent years over the future of public employment – from right-to-work laws to education reform to collective bargaining – is a deeper question about the nature of modern government: Is government employment still synonymous with “public service”?
That this question even arises owes… |
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Demint-Cornyn A-PLUS Act Is Real Conservative Education Reform
With all the attention earned by state governors recently for enacting major education reforms, it’s tempting to think that local officials can call their own shots when it comes to education policy. But states have almost no control over two of the biggest obstacles to further reform: No Child Left Behind’s impossible standards,… |
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Republican Governors Leading Nationwide Charge on Education Reform
Over the past three years, the Tea Party’s gifts to conservative politics have been legion, but none have been so acutely commendable as the grassroots movement’s ability to fundamentally reshape the parameters of political conversation on the right.
Since the beginning of the Progressive Era roughly a century ago, the slow, relentless… |
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Obama’s Student Loan Magic Act
During performances last week at the flagship state universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, President Obama executed rhetorical sleights-of-hand that would make David Copperfield blush.
Exuding the confidence of someone standing in the midst of a friendly audience, Obama told University of Iowa students, “I’m always interested… |
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Schoolhouse Rocked: Bobby Jindal Brings Real Education Reform to Louisiana
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has always been a man in a hurry. By the age of 20, he was an honors graduate of Brown University with double majors in public policy and biology. By 23, he had completed a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford (having politely declined admission to Yale Law and Harvard Medical School) and taken a position with the prestigious… |
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Obama Team Hijacks Schools’ Core Standards
The constitutional, statutory and philosophical abuses by the Obama administration continue piling up. Last week, two of the top former lawyers for the federal Department of Education released a peer-reviewed report showing the administration violating or evading three separate federal laws by pressuring states to adopt a national core curriculum.… |
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Sticking it to the Littlest Guys: Obama Chooses Teacher Unions Over Inner-City Kids
The election of Barack Obama was supposed to be a penitential act. His ascension to office, we were told, was interpretable as an offer of atonement for a nation whose founding promise of equality and liberty was soiled by the original sin of slavery. As a controlling argument for his candidacy, it was thin gruel. It’s an act of electoral… |
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Obama’s Undeclared War on College Students
Within the last month, President Barack Obama has earned plaudits from many college students for taking aim at the cost of higher education, albeit without bothering to explain why the price keeps rising. But while Obama’s supporters are cheering his rhetoric, they would do well to consider how much they will lose if he wins.
When… |
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School Testing Scandals Require New Era of Accountability
The newest wave of cheating scandals is threatening to sweep away the reputation of one of the most famous education reformers from the last decade. With pressure mounting for investigations into several academic miracles-turned-frauds, it is time for the public to demand a new era of accountability.
It’s been a bad summer… |
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Real Affirmative Action Starts with School Choice, Not Quotas
The United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to prohibit Michigan’s ban on using race as a factor in college admissions highlights liberalism’s latest failure to achieve racial equality through education. Instead of promoting policies that match students to schools where they will succeed, liberals prefer to rig… |
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Government-Sponsored Food Fights Are Liberalism’s Version of School Reform
Never let it be said that liberals refuse to reform the public school system. Or even, for that matter, that they oppose school choice. While conservatives often push for changes that affect the classroom, liberals are setting their sights on a different battleground: the cafeteria.
In what could be spun as alternative definitions… |
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Texas Governor Rick Perry Says No to Obama Education Department’s “Race to the Top” Initiative
When it comes to the creeping socialism stretching from President Barack Obama’s Washington, D.C., Texas Governor Rick Perry has a three word response, “No, thank you.” On January 13, Perry announced that Texas would not participate in the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition. … |
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Education Reform Awakens the Silent Majority
In 1965, a young economist named Mancur Olson published a book that revolutionized the study of interest group politics. In “The Logic of Collective Action,” Olson turned the conventional wisdom about the economics of political power on its head.
Up until that point, the foremost anxiety of good government devotees had been… |
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