Everyone has been so excited about the Obama children’s first week in school in the District. As a parent I am happy that the President-elect and Mrs. Obama have found an incredible school, the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in Northwest D.C., that meets their children’s educational needs. Of course, I …
President-elect Barack Obama is set to nominate Chicago Public School CEO Arne Duncan to be the next Secretary of Education. Mr. Duncan is known as one of a handful of innovative, reform-minded big city schools chiefs. How that will translate to the national level remains to be seen. Conservatives should …
Twelve years ago a Republican Congress and a Democrat president came together in a bipartisan fashion and passed one of the nation’s strongest charter school laws for the Washington, D.C., school system. The charter schools are publicly funded on a per-pupil basis and must accept any student who applies (if …
After D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee met with both John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama during the campaign, both candidates tried to claim her as his own. Obama even called her a “wonderful new superintendent.” But since taking over the D.C. school system in June 2007, Rhee has battled the …
Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorial page continued its support of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program—comparing President-elect Obama’s position on school vouchers with his family’s experience of choosing a school in the nation’s capital: Let’s hope the experience of moving his girls and finding the place where they will …
Blogging at The New York Times, Pacific Research Institute senior fellow Lance Izumi writes on the future of conservative education policy: Republicans have always favored, at least philosophically, decision-making at the most practical and effective level of government closest to the people. They abandoned this concept during the Bush years, …
Following Wall Street and Detroit, the nation’s governors have joined the growing line on Capitol Hill—begging Congress to save their states from looming fiscal shortfalls. The National Governors Association sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking states to be included in the next economic stimulus package. New York Governor David …
On Google’s Knol site, Heritage senior policy analyst Dan Lips and Joydeep Roy, Lawrence Mishel and Sean Corcoran from the Econimc Policy Institute and New York University are debating whether there is a place for performance-based teacher compensation in our public school system. Roy, Lawrence and Mishel argue that it’s difficult to …
The Los Angeles Times has a great story out today about how a team of public school teachers hand selected three students from low-income immigrant families and created their own nonprofit to help get the students into prestigious private high schools. The teacher’s principal, Scott Schmerelson, told the Times: “The …
