The Heartland Institute

A series of data analyses from the left-leaning Brookings Institution find no link between high state standards and high student achievement. “Every state already has standards placing all districts and schools within its borders under a common regime. And despite that, every state has tremendous within-state variation in achievement ...

Vouchers boost black students’ college enrollment rates by 24 percent and double student attendance at selective colleges, conclude researchers Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos in the first study to track voucher students from kindergarten to college using the gold standard of research, random assignment, to compare students who ...

There is strong evidence that instructional materials play a pivotal role in student learning and, compared to more popular reforms like merit pay and school turnarounds, changing them for the better is easy, inexpensive, and quick, conclude Matthew Chingos and Grover Whitehurst in a report for the Brookings Institution. At the ...

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is unlikely to improve academic outcomes, concludes a new report from the Brookings Institution. The Core, a set of grade-level requirements for what students should know in math and language arts, was adopted by 45 states under pressure from the Obama administration. The report estimates ...

This Brookings Institution study reviews the authorization decisions of 50 randomly selected charter school authorizers to draw conclusions about how well authorizers supervise their schools. Bryan C. Hassel and Meagan Batdorff conclude that states should allow multiple and non-school district authorizers because quality increases ...