Yesterday, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) spoke at The Heritage Foundation as part of National School Choice Week and to mark the release of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Report Card on American Education. The report ranks America’s K-12 schools in terms of performance and progress over the past year, as well as reforms and education policies. Senator DeMint says that in seeking to improve education, policymakers could take some lessons from the free market — a system that has served America well: “We were the only country that was …
With a growing number of school choice programs comes a growing body of research on how educational opportunity benefits students. These benefits manifest themselves in outcomes such as higher graduation rates, increased academic achievement, and higher levels of parent satisfaction with their children’s schools. Students in school choice programs graduate at significantly higher rates than their public school peers. A 2010 gold-standard evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP)—a voucher program for low-income children in Washington, D.C.—revealed that over 90 percent of DCOSP students graduated from high school, compared to just …
Though parents might be rejoicing that the time has come for their kids to head back to school, their happiness could be tempered by a little-known fact: They’re paying import taxes on everything from clothes to lunchboxes, musical instruments to pencils. In 2010, the government collected $25.9 billion in tariffs on imported items. Shoppers paid a total of $13.9 billion in tariffs on products like jeans, t-shirts, and tennis shoes. Tariffs are a hidden tax that increases the price of many popular back-to-school items. In the chart below, you can …
Students and teachers at Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School began the school year with the ultimate back-to-school pep rally on Tuesday. President Obama delivered a speech to students at the highly-ranked Philadelphia magnet school, which was named a 2010 national “Blue Ribbon School.” Last year, the president delivered a back-to-school speech about the importance of staying in school and the merits of education, topics he reprised in this year’s address. Last year’s protocol included a letter from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to schools nationwide, complete with lesson plans …
National Public Radio Senior Correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams writes on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program: As I watch Washington politics I am not easily given to rage. Washington politics is a game and selfishness, out-sized egos and corruption are predictable. But over the last week I find myself in a fury. The cause of my upset is watching the key civil rights issue of this generation — improving big city public school education — get tossed overboard by political gamesmanship. If there is one goal that deserves …
A month ago, Obama explored the notion of nationalizing the banks under the Swedish model. Instead of the Swedish banking model, Obama should look at the school voucher program in Sweden for inspiration. The Pacific Research Institute recently had a video Op-Ed on the New York times Web site explaining how well the voucher program works in Sweden. The voucher program in Sweden has broad bipartisan support and has defeated the “status quo” in education and the children, as well as parents, are reaping the benefits. In the video, Stockholm …
FamilyFacts.org has compiled the Top 10 Findings that explore the link between parental involvement and academic success. Studies show that there is a strong positive link between parental involvement and all areas of academic success including, school readiness for preschoolers, being well-behaved in middle school, and graduating from high school. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx8Vbeqqpno[/youtube]
