The Heartland Institute

Tuesday's ed news Michigan's governor has signed the state budget, which prohibits funds for Common Core . A bill to repeal Common Core has hit New York . Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal signs a new kind of Parent Trigger into law. A New Hampshire court rules that tax-credit scholarship students may not attend religious schools ...

Sometimes, it seems as though the debate over school reform takes place in an alternate universe where time passes but nothing really changes. Complaints about the quality of public education were widespread in the 1980s and even in the 1950s and before, and they sound surprisingly similar to those heard today. Thankfully, new ...

A judge recently ruled that a Parent Trigger petition from parents in Adelanto, California is valid and their request to convert their children’s school to a charter must go into effect. California is the first state to pass a Parent Trigger law, which a dozen other states also have considered. It allows a simple majority ...

California passed the first Parent Trigger law in January 2010, taking until September 2011 to confirm permanent regulations governing it. In the meantime, Connecticut, Mississippi, and Texas passed their own versions of the law, and in 2011 14 state legislatures also considered Parent Triggers. The Parent Trigger allows parents ...

Editors’ Note: In response to Jay Mathew’s Washington Post musings on the Parent Trigger in light of teachers union documents detailing a strategy to derail the parent empowerment legislation, Bruno Behrend, director of the Center for School Transformation, and Joy Pullmann, education research fellow and managing editor of School ...

Teachers receive job evaluations much like workers in other professions; except the “satisfactory” rates for teaching usually lie somewhere in the high 90th percentiles, according to an Education Next study. Meanwhile, even higher percentages of students fall behind in school. This casts great doubt on the validity of teacher ...

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, supported and created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, sets grade-by-grade content requirements for K–12 in English language arts and math. The consortium is also developing science and history/social studies standards. The Obama administration ...

Under the federal government’s "Early Learning Challenge" for state early education and childcare programs, states will offer a proposal, then follow through if they win a grant. The pool of money is $500 million of $700 million in Race to the Top grants available this year. Awards will be made by December 31, 2011; each ...

As Congress gears up to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, the largest federal law on education, and various school districts display the fruits of the act’s mandated testing, experts have begun to weigh in on the merits and disadvantages of national and state-administered standardized tests. NCLB greatly expanded state-mandated ...