Former East Los Angeles high school teacher, Jaime Escalante, whose exemplary teaching led to the inspiring film Stand and Deliver, passed away last week. As a math teacher at Garfield High School, Escalante was able to motivate inner-city students to achieve top scores on advanced placement calculus. His influence on …
Opponents of school choice worry that public schools will suffer when competition is introduced. They cite the diversion of money away from public schools and the “creaming” of the best students into private schools, leaving the neediest children even worse off than before. But how realistic is this scenario? A …
Monday’s announcement that Delaware and Tennessee would win the first round of Race to the Top funds put a reality check on the grand expectations for the grant competition’s potential for true reform. While many of the first round’s 16 finalists presented applications strongly committed to the specific grant requirements …
Congress and the Obama administration seem to want to ignore the issue of school choice and let the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program die of neglect. But across the nation, school choice is on the march and isn’t going away any time soon. Last week, the Democrat-controlled Illinois Senate passed a …
The administration has just announced its round one Race to the Top winners, and only two states – drum roll please – Tennessee and Delaware, made the cut. The stated purpose of $4.35 billion RttT program is to increase teacher quality, improve failing schools, enhance the quality of state assessments, …
Chicago witnessed one small victory for urban school reform and parental choice yesterday as the Illinois State Senate voted 33-20 to approve a pilot voucher program for low-income Chicago students currently attending the city’s worst performing schools. The School Choice Act, sponsored by Democrat James Meeks, provides children in Kindergarten …
President Obama is a school choice success story, and 38 percent of those in Congress have sent a child to a private school. So why are they denying the same choice to low-income parents in our nation’s capital? The Obama administration and Congress have put the successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship …
The recently released 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading results for grades 4 and 8 suggest that the sweeping education reforms implemented in Florida since 1998 have led to gains in achievement. One of the concerns raised by NAEP evaluators at a press conference to announce the test’s …
Results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment have just been released and are, well, uninspiring. Reading achievement, despite significant increases in spending over the past few decades and increasing federal policy intervention in the past decade, has remained flat. The lackluster results indicate that the …
