The Foundry

Posts Tagged ‘education reform’

• Will 2010 Be a Landmark Year for Education Reform?

  Posted March 2nd, 2010 at 12:00pm in Education with 5 comments

  While China rings in 2010 as the year of the tiger, American families and taxpayers might soon be able to refer to 2010 as the year school choice became the norm. Five states in particular are worth watching: Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Virginia and New Jersey. Ironically perhaps, Illinois is home to the most notable opponents of [...] More

• Budget 2011: Freezing Opportunity – New Budget Means the End of School Choice for Many

  Posted February 5th, 2010 at 2:00pm in Education with 4 comments

  The president’s proposed FY2011 budget increases funding to the Department of Education by $3.5 billion. But despite this significant increase, his budget effectively cuts the freedom of choice and educational opportunities from the lives of children living in the District of Columbia. What began last year as a low-profile attempt to quietly phase out the [...] More

• Save the Children—in Washington, D.C.

  Posted November 27th, 2009 at 10:42am in Education with 13 comments

  Speaking on education this past March, President Obama told Americans that he believes in only “one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” OK, great! Here’s something that works: the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. It’s a federal initiative [...] More

• In the Green Room: Prof. James Tooley on Education Reform for the World’s Poor and the US

  Posted October 15th, 2009 at 12:46pm in Education with 3 comments

  “Be bold,” says James Tooley when you want education reform. He’d know. For the last decade the Newcastle University Professor has been traveling throughout the world’s poorest regions studying systems of education. What he’s discovered may be surprising. In the poorest countries on earth, parents are choosing private schools because they don’t want to acquiesce to the [...] More

• Rose D. Friedman, Quite a Teacher

  Posted August 18th, 2009 at 2:31pm in Education with 6 comments

  Liberty lost one of its finest advocates this morning. Rose Director Friedman died of heart failure in Davis, Calif. She was thought to be 98. Rose was best known as the wife of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who died in 2006. But Rose, an economist herself, was Milton’s intellectual partner. Together, they co-authored the [...] More

• MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: Save School Choice in D.C.

  Posted July 23rd, 2009 at 3:02pm in Education with 9 comments

  Support for school choice in Washington, D.C. continues to grow. The latest national voice to call for saving the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Check out this Hardball interview with RNC Chairman Michael Steele: Mr. Matthews says: “These opportunity scholarships should be maintained.” Later in the interview, Mr. Matthews makes an interesting point [...] More

• Ricci and Real Opportunity Through Education

  Posted July 1st, 2009 at 2:35pm in Education with 2 comments

  Writing in Forbes yesterday, the Goldwater Institute’s Clint Bolick argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ricci v. DeStafano should result in renewed attention to education reform and the need to improve educational opportunities for all people: “[The ruling] also brought the nation closer to an important day of reckoning. When blacks and Hispanics flunk examinations, [...] More

• Bringing the Best and Brightest into the Classroom

  Posted April 30th, 2009 at 3:36pm in Education with 7 comments

  Derrell Bradford of Excellent Education for Everyone highlights a disturbing finding from the New Jersey Department of Education at NJ.com—a majority of NJ students who failed the high school exit exam (described by state education commission as “middle school level”) had apparently taken and passed courses in Geometry, Algebra I and II, and Biology. [...] More

• And They Can’t Even Read Bills …

  Posted April 29th, 2009 at 2:37pm in Education with 1 comments

  Talk about the audacity of  “nope.”  “When parents recognize which schools are failing to educate their children,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in a guest column in The Wall Street Journal, “they will demand more effective options for their kids.” Americans “must close the achievement gap by pursuing what works best for kids, regardless of ideology,” Duncan [...] More

• Performance-Based Pay for Education

  Posted October 29th, 2008 at 5:40pm in Education with 3 comments

  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 measure a teacher’s role in [...] More