The Heartland Institute

Nevada’s education system is on a downward spiral, says former state Superintendent James Guthrie. He recommends one dramatic change: Paying top teachers $200,000 per year. Dr. Guthrie joins the podcast to discuss his proposal, which he published recently in a Nevada Policy Research Institute paper . We talk about why Nevada ...

School choice opponents frequently claim vouchers don't improve recipients' academics, hurt public schools, cost taxpayers, increase segregation, and even reduce civic unity. A new report reviewing the highest-quality research on all these topics concludes the opposite is true. Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation ...

Joy Pullmann, managing editor of School Reform News, has been traveling the country spreading the word about the common core and why people should oppose it. She discusses her travels with Heartland's Jim Lakely. ...

New reports have found that one in four African-American students has been suspended, compared to less than one in ten white students. School discipline is a controversial issue. Are kids responsible for their own bad behavior? Are their parents? What about schools? A new report shows how concerned Milwaukee parents and ...

About a decade ago, James Tooley wandered out into a foreign slum and encountered a network of inexpensive private schools on every few street corners. The professor of education policy at Newcastle University and his team went back to study this system of education, and found that private schools serve the world's poor ...

Because bureaucrats control public schools, public schools have for decades pushed successive generations of Americans farther and farther left, says Karen Schroeder. She's president of Advocates for Academic Freedom and a Wisconsin public school teacher who has seen this first-hand. Because textbooks and teacher training are ...

Capitalism once did a superior job providing K-12 schooling in the United States, and would do so once again if the public could overcome its fear of markets and economics, wrote Herbert Walberg and Joe Bast in their book, Education and Capitalism . It’s the book's ten-year anniversary, so Walberg joins the podcast to ...

The federal government uses money to push states around all the time, so why not use it for something good for kids? That’s the idea behind a new advocacy group that wants a new federal law requiring any state that accepts any federal education dollars to change the method they use to fund K-12 education. John Conlin ...

A new book explains how U.S. education's commitment to political correctness destroys free speech and its protection of our constitutional democracy. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and author of Unlearning Libert y, joins the podcast to talk about how higher education, and especially ...

It's easy to caterwaul about the problems in U.S. education, but many young people still manage to fall in love with learning at a young age. Joining the School Reform News podcast to talk about her intellectual cultivation and desire to use it to serve others is Rose Berman, a sophomore at the University of Chicago ...

States including Indiana, Texas, and North Carolina considering legislation creating vocational high school diplomas for students who are interested in a career that doesn’t require a four-year college degree. Why don't many Americans esteem vocational education, and what are its benefits to young people and communities? Mark ...

Joy Pullmann discusses Universal Prek and evidence that it actually hurts children, instead of helping them, on the Coffee and Markets Podcast. ...

Can you quantify the dollar value of school choice? Michael McShane thinks he can. He and Patrick Wolf published a study concluding that every $1 taxpayers spend on the Washington DC vouchers program generates $2.62 in economic benefits for the participants and society. He joins the School Reform News podcast to talk about ...

Microlearning may be an unfamiliar term, but you’ve probably done it. Find out what it means, and how it relates to the universe of online learning, learning games, and education apps with Greg Drukala, co-founder and chief engineer of KnowledgeFox. He and School Reform News Managing Editor Joy Pullmann discuss how adults ...

Although most young people voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012, his signature achievement is particularly crushing to their freedom, health needs, and pocket books, says Dr. Alieta Eck. She is the founder of Zarephath Health Center in New Jersey, a free health clinic for poor and uninsured people. Dr. Eck outlines a ...

Father, teacher, and education policy PhD candidate James Shuls shares what happened to his first-grade son's math instruction when Common Core came to town. His son's school district embarked on a "fuzzy math" policy that confuses kids and deprives them of real math knowledge. This is why, Shuls wrote , parents need school ...

Joy Pullman, Research Fellow of Education Policy at the Heartland Institute, discusses an Indiana Senate hearing on the common core. ...

Collaboration and group work are all the rage in education right now. But research indicates people do their best work individually. One of the latest such studies comes from the Netherlands, and was recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Bernard Nijstad, a professor at the University of Groningen ...

Will the rise of online learning undermine liberalism’s control over education? Lewis Andrews thinks so. He joins the podcast to discuss his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the topic. There, Andrews writes, “As performance-based incentive structures spread, course designers and school-based curriculum directors will ...

Adults who speak English poorly lose $3,000 per year in wages, which totals $37.7 billion annual loss in U.S. earnings, concludes a new report from the Lexington Institute. Institute president and report coauthor Don Soifer joins the podcast to talk English language learners and their growing impact on public schools and ...