A most remarkable “year of school choice” may be edging to a close, but the momentum for school choice is far from over. On the heels of Indiana’s success, states like Tennessee are looking to introduce educational options for their students in the upcoming year. The discussion surrounding school choice isn’t a new one for the state, but as the Education Action Group (EAG) reports, the success of Indiana in passing the most expansive school choice program in the nation—one which has attracted nearly 4,000 students in its first year …
In 1999, the Memphis zip code ranked as the third poorest in the country. Home to the Cleaborn and Foote housing projects, unemployment sat above 70 percent. Almost 50 percent of the community lacked a high school degree. Drugs and gangs plagued the community, and most residents had dim prospects of rising out of persistent poverty. In this environment, Steve Nash founded Advance Memphis in 1999. Recognizing the need for a friendly face and a chance at self-sufficiency, Nash started driving around Memphis’s worst communities trying to personally connect with …
Tennessee could soon become the latest state to deal public-sector collective bargaining a major blow. The Tennessee state House has just passed a measure that limits collective bargaining for teachers. Education employees would no longer be able to bargain over performance pay and school assignment policies, such as teacher compensation and layoffs. The Senate version of the bill eliminates collective bargaining altogether. The two bills will now have to be reconciled in conference committee before heading on to Governor Bill Haslam’s (R) desk for approval. Tennessee is working to curb …
It’s not exactly news that the federal No Child Left Behind program has encouraged the states to define proficiency downward in order to avoid triggering various federal sanctions. But judging from Education Next’s recent grading of state proficiency standards, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program is no fix. Here’s the journal’s overall finding: “Every state, for both reading and math (with the exception of Massachusetts for math), deems more students ‘proficient’ on its own assessments than NAEP [the National Assessment of Educational Progress] does. The average difference is 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, and build data systems to measure student growth. The identification of just two first-round winners falls short of the number most analysts predicted. While it is unclear as of yet exactly why those two states made the cut, the New …
Most everyone agrees that decreasing the number of the uninsured is an important goal of health care legislation. What is not agreed upon is the best way to achieve that goal. Obama’s health care plan depends on expanding the number of Americans enrolled in Medicaid – the government-run program for the poor and disabled. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the Senate bill would account for about 50 percent of the reduction in the uninsured population at a cost of $395 billion over 10 years. New research by Heritage’s health …
Rep. Marsha Blackburn has seen the future of health care in America that the Left wants to implement. Blackburn’s home state of Tennessee implemented TennCare, a Medicaid style program in 1994. The results were predictable. Employers moved employees onto TennCare because the subsidized public plan appeared to cost less. “As a result of this, insurance rates for those who have private coverage were going through the roof,” said Blackburn who spoke at Heritage’s weekly Blogger Briefing today.
U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn issued a warning to her Senate counterparts who are introducing massive health reform bills this week: Learn from Tennessee’s experiment into “nationalized” health care. “All approaches for a nationalized health care system simply don’t work, and we saw this with TennCare,” Blackburn said this week during a discussion on the future of employer-based health coverage at The Heritage Foundation. In 1995, the state implemented TennCare, a health program modeled after Medicaid. While it covered more uninsured adults, the budget-busting program grew at a 1.5-percent annual rate, …
