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Posts Tagged ‘school choice’
October 25th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
DOJ Steps Up Thuggishness in Louisiana School Choice Case
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The idea that this disservice to poor, primarily African-American children is is the product of the nation’s first black Attorney General, serving at the pleasure of its first black president is appalling. From Elizabeth Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon:

The Justice Department is attempting to block parents from defending the Louisiana school voucher program in court, according to a brief filed Tuesday.

… The DOJ is seeking a permanent injunction against the school choice program, which would block access to vouchers beginning in 2014 unless a federal judge approves them. The lawsuit claims the vouchers are “impeding desegregation” because some recipients were in the racial minority at their failing school. Vouchers are awarded randomly by lottery.

The DOJ said in a motion filed Tuesday that parents whose kids have benefited from the program have no legal standing to become defendants in the case.

The racial bean-counting is (A) a fig leaf for the Administration’s real goal of scoring a win against school choice and (B) a window into the collectivist’s soul: they care more about the amalgamation of pigment in any given classroom than the lives of the children living within that skin. Now add to that injury the insult of being told by your government that you have no right to defend your child’s right to a decent education.

Shameful and wrong. Let us hope that the DOJ is defeated—and that the courts treat it with the scorn it so richly deserves,

March 11th, 2013 at 11:07 am
Bama School Choice Battle Brewing

In Alabama two weeks ago, the state Legislature pulled an old switcheroo in conference committee to push through a sweeping but focused statewide school choice bill. The bill provides a tuition tax credit (refundable) to any students in districts where there are officially “failing” schools, to attend any school, public or private, of their choice (assuming they meet any other eligibility requirements). It also allows individuals and businesses to take a tax credit for donations to what amounts to a scholarship fund, to be used for the same purpose.

The problem is, the “choice” elements of the bill were not part of the original bill in the state House or the state Senate (instead, it was a narrower “school flexibility” bill, good in itself, but not involving any widespread parental choice). The broader elements of the bill were appended to the bill in conference committee, with almost no debate, and then rushed through both the House and Senate floors with almost no debate, but with huge majorities.

The state education union filed suit, claiming the procedures used violated both the state Constitution and the sate’s unique “Open Meetings” law. While I don’t discuss the constitutional issue here (I don’t think the complaint holds water), I do explain on WKRG-TV in Mobile why schoolchildren will be the winners, and why the law will probably succeed legal challenge based on the Open Meetings law, but also be a short-term political detriment to the Republicans who pushed it through.  For school choice advocates, not just locally but nationally, this Alabama brouhaha won’t fade away any time real soon, and it bears close scrutiny on numerous levels. I personally think it is a wonderful bill. But the politics of it all are likely to be dicey for a while. Anyway, again, please watch this very short news segment (3:39) for an overview.

September 20th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
The Party of the Teachers Unions
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Now that the Chicago teachers’ strike has come to an end (a mostly unsatisfactory one, as chronicled by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute’s Public Sector Inc., Paul Kersey), the issue will likely fall out of national consciousness by week’s end. But there is one fact from this struggle that will remain with me for the foreseeable future. It was buried deep in the recesses of the Wall Street Journal‘s interview from last weekend with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and it’s an extremely telling statistic about the party that considers itself the vanguard of civil rights:

We’re seven weeks from a presidential election in which Barack Obama needs all the cash and foot soldiers that organized labor can provide. His Super PAC’s chief fundraiser is none other than Rahm Emanuel. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s chief funders remain teachers unions, groups that also accounted for an estimated 20% of delegates at the recent Democratic National Convention. So you can imagine why Chicago’s unionized teachers struck now, gambling that Mr. Emanuel’s killer instinct may be stayed at least for the season.

One out of every five representatives of the Democratic Party on the floor (or at least at the hosted bar) in Charlotte represented institutions whose lust for self-preservation has the practical effect of killing minority achievement and ambition  in school districts throughout America. Their parents, who are overwhelmingly expected to vote for Barack Obama, ought to pause on that fact. The sacrifice of generations of schoolchildren is too high a price to pay for identity politics.

August 30th, 2012 at 2:56 pm
On the Shamelessness of Teacher Unions
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I’ve posted here on the blog before about the ongoing fight over Governor Bobby Jindal’s bold education reforms in Louisiana, which have left the Pelican State’s teachers unions incensed. And in my column this week, I discussed the relentless tendency of liberals to rhetorically exploit African-Americans while supporting policies that harm black communities. Yet even though these two trends are not new, I’m still gobsmacked that it has come to this shameful nadir. From the Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry:

A major state-level teachers union accused a group promoting school choice for African-American families of supporting the notorious white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan in a series of statements on Thursday.

The Louisiana Federation of Teachers accused the Louisiana Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) of advancing a “pro-KKK agenda,” in the words of one tweet sent from the union’s official Twitter account. Another claimed that the group “endorses teaching that the KKK is good.”

The BAEO works to “increase access to high-quality educational options for Black children by actively supporting parental choice policies and programs that empower low-income and working-class Black families,” according to its website.

In response to this filth, the head of the BAEO put out a statement reading, in part:

BAEO and its allies fight every single day to give children from low-income families access to the best educational options possible. We fight to overcome the institutional bigotry that has sentenced thousands of black children across the country to a substandard education. It’s a sad day when an organization like the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, which says it cares about kids, is among the organizations using degrading, race-baiting tactics to demean the very people who are doing their best to give kids hope.

Unfortunately, we’re well past the point when the teachers unions’ arguments were about the kids. These days, it’s about nothing more than holding on to power. The children are little more than collateral damage.

August 28th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Study: More African Americans Go to College with School Vouchers
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Chalk up another win for advocates of school choice. Opposition to school vouchers is usually steeped in language about the policy being “risky” or “untried” (it’s a uniquely liberal gift to prefer guaranteed failure over possible success). But a new study out of the Brookings Institution (no one’s definition of a conservative haven) shows powerful results for young African-Americans:

In the first study, using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. They find no overall impacts on college enrollment but do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African-American students who participated in the study.

 

Their estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent.

To say that Mitt Romney is struggling with black voters would be an understatement. That’s a real shame. Barack Obama may give them rhetorical affirmation and a sense of common identity; but Mitt Romney, who supports greater educational freedom, could actually bring them hope and change.

August 23rd, 2012 at 1:12 pm
In Indiana, an Education Success Story
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Here at the Center for Individual Freedom, we recently launched a State Sovereignty Project that aims to encourage states to resist Washington’s encroachment on their constitutionally-protected powers. While resisting federal overreach is, in and of itself, a worthy pursuit, it becomes even more valuable when the states then use that freedom to enact major public policy innovations.

As I’ve noted here before, one of the areas where that charge is being met with the most vigor is in education reform, where a handful of Republican governors are transforming the way we think about public schools. One of the leading lights of this crusade has been Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, who successfully pushed legislation providing for the sweeping use of school vouchers in the Hoosier State. As a recent profile by The Economist notes, he’s getting results:

The voucher scheme, potentially the biggest in America, was set up a year ago as part of a big package of educational reforms led by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, and his superintendent of schools. These include teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, giving school heads more autonomy and encouraging the growth of charter schools. Jeanne Allen, president of the Centre for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, says the reforms are unique because Indiana has looked at education reform in its “totality”, rather than taking a piecemeal approach as many other states have done.

The Indiana scheme has allayed fears that vouchers will not reach their target audience of low-income families. In the first year about 85-90% of children receiving them have come from households that qualify for free school lunches. Moderate-income families can receive a voucher with a lower value. … Indiana’s philosophy of promoting choice has also extended to making it possible for students to apply to any public school—including those outside the school district in which the child lives. And some signs suggest greater choice is having a positive effect in Indiana. For one thing, some public schools have started to compete for students. They are advertising their educational prowess directly to parents, through billboard signs on highways, mailing campaigns and clothes carrying slogans. Schools are trying to make themselves more attractive to students, for example by buying iPads.

All well and good, but we can already hear the skeptics saying that competing for students isn’t the same as generating better results. Well …

The reforms have had already phenomenal results, according to Mrs Allen. Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, arrived in 2009. Every student performance indicator has improved he says and over the last two years the state has ranked second in the country for achievement on college-level courses taken in high school. Graduation rates from high school are at an all-time high.

Competition is working intra-state in Indiana. Now, it falls to federalism to get it to work inter-state. If the Hoosier State keeps up the progress, it won’t be long before the nation’s education laggards start to realize that they could improve their results by following Indianapolis’ lead. No such comparisons would have been possible had education reform been imposed top-down from Washington. That’s one more reason to defend the Tenth Amendment.

August 1st, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Louisiana Teachers Unions Fight a Desperate Rearguard
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A few months ago, I authored a column here touting the extraordinary accomplishments of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in enacting perhaps the most sweeping piece of education reform in the country. Part of what made the reform possible, I noted at the time, was the relative weakness of teacher unions in the Pelican State:

The laws passed by the Louisiana legislature last week read like a conservative education reformer’s wish list. Teacher tenure, which previously required three years of employment, will now be contingent on educators receiving a “highly effective” rating in five out of six consecutive years. Back-to-back “ineffective” ratings will be a firing offense. Seniority will no longer be a dominant factor in layoff decisions. Decisions about teacher employment and pay will largely devolve to principals and superintendents (they had previously been dominated by local school boards), allowing them to act with the dispatch becoming of an executive.

The reforms go well beyond personnel matters, however. They open up opportunities for charter schools, allowing new providers to enter the market. They offer vouchers that will allow poor and middle-income children in Louisiana’s worst schools to attend private or parochial institutions. They even expand opportunities for online learning.

Had Jindal tried something nearly as audacious in a union-dominated state like California, Illinois or New York, the proposal surely would have been stillborn in committee. But in right-to-work Louisiana, where the unions aren’t subsidized by compulsory membership, the best that organized labor can do is flail in anger after the fact. And flail they have.

Well, the flailing is now reaching a crescendo. As is the tendency of unions that can’t win arguments at the ballot box, organized labor is now taking the fight to the courts. From the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

On Thursday, lawyers representing the unions faxed letters to about 100 of the 119 schools that are participating in the voucher program. “Our clients have directed us to take whatever means necessary,” the letter reads. Unless the school agrees to turn away voucher students, “we will have no alternative other than to institute litigation.” The letter demanded an answer in writing by the next day.

Louisiana’s voucher program is adjusted for family income and is intended above all to give a shot at a decent education to underprivileged minorities, who are more likely to be relegated to the worst public schools. Forty-four percent of Louisiana public schools received a D or F ranking under the state’s grading system, and some 84% of the kids in the program come from one of those low-performing schools.

Demand for vouchers has been overwhelming: There were 10,300 applications for 5,600 slots. Despite claims to the contrary by school-choice opponents, low-income parents can and do act rationally when it comes to the education of their children.

That last sentence, I think, says it all. Liberals — who reflexively bay about the plight of the underclass — are actively complicit in keeping them “under”; that is, in denying them both opportunity and aspiration. They are there for the poor only to the extent that it does not conflict with the interests of one of their client groups. In this instance, they have chosen the pecuniary interests of the unions over the future of Louisiana’s children. There is much shame in that. Citizens of Louisiana would do well to make them bear it.

July 12th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
One More Exception on Education Reform
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Quin’s right to point out Alabama’s Robert Bentley as an exception to the growing trend of conservative governors pushing education reform pointed out in my column this week. Bentley deserves every ounce of scorn he’s getting for knuckling under to the unions. And while we’re in the midst of handing out demerits, I’ll also nominate Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.

Around the same time that Bobby Jindal’s education reform package in Louisiana was doing its victory lap, Brewer vetoed a huge expansion of school vouchers in the Grand Canyon State with an explanation that defies exegesis:

… Brewer, while describing herself as a long-time advocate of school choice—citing other legislation she has signed promoting educational competition—also said “there is a careful balance we have to maintain.”

“We must enhance educational options wherever we can, but we must also ensure that government is not artificially manipulating the market through state budget or tax policy that would make an otherwise viable option so unattractive that it undermines rational choice in a competitive market,” the governor explained.

Impenetrable. This reads like a veto statement by James Joyce.

Obviously Brewer didn’t want to deal with the backlash from the educational establishment, so she sold out the members of the state legislature who were brave enough to take up the fight. How folks like Bentley and Brewer can look their state’s schoolchildren in the eyes is beyond me.

June 20th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Federal Government Creating Green Jobs … at $12 Million a Pop
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Further evidence that the Obama Administration’s green jobs fetish defies all logic, economic or otherwise, comes from this report from CNS News:

An Obama administration green jobs grant program that spent $11 billion lacks a verifiable job-counting system and likely created only a fraction of the jobs it claims, according to a staff report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

While Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the grants “created tens of thousands of jobs,” the government’s own National Renewal Energy Laboratory estimates it created 910 direct jobs.

The House report criticized even those numbers, saying: “The job creation numbers that exist for Section 1603 are based on models, not actual data from completed projects. Neither Treasury nor DOE have turned over actual jobs data on the Section 1603 grants program to the committee.”

In the spirit of generosity, let’s assume the 910 number is correct. At $11 billion, that comes out to well over $12 million per job. A ludicrous amount to be sure, but also one that comes with an enormous opportunity cost. Scroll down the page to Ashton’s post on the cost-effectiveness of Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program and you’ll find that the whole thing (which the Obama Administration has consistently targeted for elimination) could be funded at the cost of less than two of those green jobs.

The character of this administration can be defined by its priorities. Does anything more need to be said than that they would rather slip millions of taxpayer dollars to tech firms who haven’t so much as worked up a business model than to poor children in the inner city? Hope indeed.

June 19th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Graph: DC School Choice Saves Money

Finally, an election evolution that puts President Barack Obama on the side of the angels.

From the Washington Post:

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the authors of legislation that reauthorized and expanded the Opportunity Scholarship Program, said they had reached an agreement with the White House to ensure that enrollment in the program can grow and that parents can apply to have their children stay in or join the program and get a response as soon as possible.

“I’m pleased that an agreement has been reached to expand the program, consistent with the law already on the books,” Boehner said, praising the scholarships as “both effective and cost-effective.”

How cost-effective?  The price of a D.C. Opportunity Scholarship is $8,000 per year.  The cost of educating the same child in the D.C. public school system is $18,000 per year.

Here’s a Heritage Foundation graph showing how much the D.C. school voucher program costs federal taxpayers:

http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/DCOSP-Chart.jpg

So, not only are kids receiving D.C. school vouchers getting the education their parents want; they’re doing it for less than half of what it would cost if the vouchers didn’t exist.

Let’s hope President Obama evolves to the point where every D.C. child gets an Opportunity Scholarship.  They – and the taxpayers – will be better off.

June 16th, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Jindal Outdoes Bentley (of Alabama) on School Choice

I have a piece out in the new Weekly Standard about how Alabama failed in its efforts to allow charter schools. My friend RiShawn Biddle just sent me a piece of his own from some time back that I had not seen, that makes some of the same points. Biddle’s piece is a broader overview, and it is excellent.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from my piece:

A powerful union won’t stay down long unless a strong governor, like Jindal, keeps a reformist agenda front and center. Lack of gubernatorial leadership, as in Alabama, can lead to a major fiasco. This is especially true when the union finds unlikely allies to carry its water. Most of the state’s county school superintendents, usually at odds with the union, and most local school boards, sometimes at odds with the AEA, along with the statewide school superintendent, appointed by a non-union-friendly state board, all came out vociferously against charters. ….Finally, Governor Robert Bentley, elected with the indirect help of the AEA (which spent some $3 million attacking his Republican primary opponent), provided only the most tepid of support for charters.

Governors matter. Biddle pushes the same themes, opening thusly:

If you want to understand why gubernatorial leadership matters in overhauling American public education — and why school reformers must mobilize politically in order to gain traction for their efforts — consider the profiles in courage -(or lack thereof) of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal in advancing their respective school choice and systemic reform plans. 

May 11th, 2012 at 9:41 am
Video: Obama’s Hypocritical Class Warfare
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In this week’s “Freedom Minute,” CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the deception and hypocrisy of President Obama’s class warfare.

March 27th, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Louisiana Teacher Unions Happy to Sell Out Kids for Political Gain
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Last week, Quin blogged about the progress being made on behalf of school choice in Louisiana, largely because of the leadership of Governor Bobby Jindal. This week, the teachers unions are striking back in the manner they know best: abandoning their students. From Southwest Louisiana’s American Press:

Calcasieu Parish Superintendent of Schools Wayne Savoy announced Monday morning that all public schools in the parish would be closed Tuesday due to “excessive employee absences.”

Teachers will be traveling to Baton Rouge to protest pending legislation regarding public education and express their opinions on the voucher system and tenure laws that was approved by the state House last week.

Here in California, the unions did the same thing during last year’s “state of emergency” protests, abandoning their classrooms to converge on Sacramento (and doing so the same week that important statewide tests were being administered, no less). I bring that up only to note that this is business as usual for organized labor throughout the country. They get paid by the taxpayers; But they serve only themselves.

The unions are fond of telling us “the children” are their first priority. Their actions tell us otherwise.

March 26th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
Meet Your Next Secretary of Education
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If the next Republican president has a brain in his head — and if the federal Department of Education must remain (it sadly seems as if we’re beyond a day when cabinet departments can disappear, their very existence now functioning as prima facie evidence of their worth) — he’ll pick Michelle Rhee to be his Secretary of Education.

Rhee spent three years as the chancellor of Washington D.C.’s public schools — one of the nation’s worst (and most expensive) educational systems — before resigning in the fall of 2010 with the election of a new mayor. During that time, Rhee was a game-changer, firing nearly 250 under-performing teachers in one blow, closing down failing schools, and devising an extraordinarily clever workaround for tenure reform.

These days, Rhee is running an education non-profit and living in Sacramento, where her husband, former NBA star Kevin Johnson, is the mayor. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend, she demonstrated why — in addition to her impressive record — she has the chops to be the next Secretary of Education; Because she not only has a strong grasp on first principles, but an artful way of presenting them:

Q: You are archenemy No. 1, according to the teachers unions. Do you see a way to work with them rather than wage war with them?

Rhee: First of all, we definitely did not wage war on the union. In fact, the union has very little to do with what we’re focused on really at all.

What we are focused on is a pro-kid agenda. And if we have to fight the existing district bureaucracy, state legislators, teachers, whoever is standing in the way of kids getting the education they deserve and trying to protect the status quo, and maintain the way things are, we’re going to be willing to fight against any of those.

I believe that the teachers unions are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. They were designed to be professional organizations that protect the rights and privileges and pay of their members. … The problem is that we don’t have an organized national interest group with the same heft as the teachers union that’s advocating on behalf of children.

This, it seems to me, is a remarkably sober response to the ever-expanding influence of teacher unions on education policy: I will not decry you, I will simply defeat you. Game on, Madame Secretary.

March 23rd, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Jindal, School Choice, Halfway Home

Bobby Jindal and school reform both won big today in the LA House of Reps.

This bears celebrating, as it is expected to pass the state Senate as well. Already, the vast bulk of New Orleans public schools are charters; this bill would spread various forms of choice statewide. Charters in New Orleans post-Katrina have been remarkably successful.

February 14th, 2012 at 3:07 pm
Obama Budget Looks to Kill School Choice in Washington D.C.
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If there’s one controlling lesson after three years of the Obama Administration, it’s this: watch what he does, not what he says.

For all of his pieities about being a serious education reformer, Obama has time and again cast his lot with the liberal teachers unions that are perhaps the biggest threat to opportunity for the nation’s underprivileged children. This trend showed up early in his presidency, when he attempted to bleed Washington D.C.’s school voucher program by prohibiting new entrants. Apparently, hope and change wasn’t an offer for poor, overwhelmingly minority students in some of the nation’s worst schools.

Thanks to the efforts of Republicans in Congress, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is back in action. But under President Obama’s new budget proposal released yesterday, it would be zeroed out. What makes clear that this is a shameless gift to special interests is how decisively the facts weigh in favor of the program. Consider this, from the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke:

The D.C. OSP has been highly successful. According to federally-mandated evaluations of the program, student achievement has increased, and graduation rates of voucher students have increased significantly. While graduation rates in D.C. Public Schools hover around 55 percent, students who used a voucher to attend private school had a 91 percent graduation rate.

And at $8,000, the vouchers are a bargain compared to the estimated $18,000 spent per child by D.C. Public Schools.

Better outcomes at lower costs. A new generation of young minority students who don’t believe that life ends at 18. And the first reaction of the President of the United States is to see how fast this innovation can be smothered. Many of Obama’s positions can be challenged on the grounds of incorrectness or imprudence. This one, however, deserves disdain for its rank inhumanity.

October 21st, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Former Clinton Advisor Comes Out Firmly for Charter Schools
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If you’re a regular Fox News viewer, you’re probably familiar with Lanny Davis, the longtime Democratic political hand and former Special Counsel to President Clinton. On television, Davis can usually be seen defending Democratic orthodoxy with vigor.  He’s taken a recent turn in print, however, that shows he’s unafraid to gore one of his party’s most sacred cows: opposition to charter schools. From the piece:

The deal is this: The contract, or “charter,” allows the outside entity to operate the school free of the uniform rules applying to curriculum, teaching salaries, hiring and firing and other operating details that are applicable to all public schools; but in return, the charter school must deliver on pre-agreed goals, such as performance measured by standardized tests or graduation rates.

What does this achieve? A lot. First and foremost, it busts monopoly power, where one organization, such as the school district, has a captive group of customers, i.e., public school students, who have no choice but to be subject to the monopoly. And it provides the benefit of competition — students have choices, and if the charter school doesn’t work, they (i.e., their parents) can vote with their feet. And perhaps more importantly, the public school system is no longer a monopoly — they must do better or they will lose more students to charter schools within the public school system.

Imagine that: an institution that has to face consequences for failing its consumers. At at time when the folks over at Occupy Wall Street are casting their lot with the teachers unions that trap children in failing schools, it’s nice to see at least one liberal who realizes that “sticking up for the little guy” means defending the students, not indulging big labor.

October 14th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
‘Occupy’ Protests So Anti-Establishment They’re Now Joined by One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Special Interests
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The ‘Occupy’ protests that have been springing up around the nation aren’t particularly well-defined. As best I can tell, there’s a visceral aversion to capitalism, accompanied by an endless array of non sequitur liberal causes (one protester’s sign at Occupy Los Angeles read “end heterosexism”).  In truth, however, this seems to be first and foremost an aesthetic movement aimed at recapturing the grimy romance of the halcyon years of protest in the Vietnam era. As such, it defines itself primarily by its opposition to institutional power, capaciously defined.

That’s why it’s so ironic that the movement now has the backing of one of the most powerful — and malign — special interests in the nation. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The California Teachers Association jumped on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon Thursday, throwing the weight of 325,000 state teachers behind the movement for “tax fairness and against corporate greed.”

About that last bit: the CTA, which is one of the most nation’s destructive teachers unions, knows a thing or two about big money. It’s spent over $210 million in the course of the last decade to influence California state government — more than “big oil”, “big tobacco”, and “big pharma” combined. The results? Defeats for school voucher propositions, teacher accountability measures, and paycheck protection for educators. Not to mention that California — formerly a national leader in the classroom — now ranks among the bottom five American states in most education metrics.

Corruption, nest-feathering, and sticking it to the little guy. Sound familiar, Occupy protesters? Don’t look know, but you just got in bed with The Man.

May 23rd, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Tennessee Leads the Way on Education Reform
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Three cheers today for my (intermittent) home state of Tennessee, which has just passed a package of education reforms that should be held up as national models:

Cheer # 1 — The Volunteer State is doing away with tenure-based layoffs, in which teachers who’ve been on the job the longest are insulated from dismissal regardless of job performance.

Cheer # 2 — Tennessee is abolishing the cap on public charter schools, institutions that are controlled by the government but given much greater administrative flexibility than traditional public schools. This will allow for much broader educational competition — a move that will create more opportunities for children trapped in failing institutions.

Cheer # 3 — The state is also creating universal access to charters. Previous iterations of the policy had restricted which students were eligible to attend the schools.

With these reforms, the state of Tennessee has shown that it understands the most important principle of public education: the needs of the students come before those of bureaucrats and public employees. We salute their courage and look forward to the results.

April 8th, 2011 at 9:24 am
Video – School Choice: The Next Great Fight for Civil Rights
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Noting that one of the few areas where government continues to enforce inequality is in America’s public schools, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the fight for school choice and calls it “the greatest civil rights issue of our generation.”