The Heartland Institute

The Indiana Choice Program has the potential to be the largest and most diverse manifestation of school choice in America, writes Michael McShane in this American Enterprise Institute working paper. Parents want school options. But without increasing the scholarship amount, eliminating the prior public school enrollment requirement ...

The flood of new legislative activity regarding teacher evaluations responds to obvious problems with old systems, but also risks cementing premature solutions and imperfect metrics, write the three authors of this American Enterprise Institute report. The paper highlights four tensions to consider in developing new teacher evaluations ...

A wave of education reform advocacy organizations are working to pull parents into larger policy debates over school reform by mobilizing them to lobby policymakers, testify in front of school boards, and vote for certain policies. Reformers’ high hopes and good intentions often lead to naïve expectations of what parent power ...

President Obama has announced a way to help states get around No Child Left Behind’s requirements. His plan grants certain states waivers from No Child Left Behind accountability requirements if they agree to a series of preset conditions. Although many states are enthusiastic about obtaining this relief, the waiver plan poses ...

By characterizing education primarily as the path to personal and professional advancement, reformers have (albeit unintentionally) redefined education as a private good, divorcing schooling from its historic role of instructing young people for citizenship, write Robin Lake and Cheryl Miller in a report for the American Enterprise ...

Largely missing from the debate over for-profit higher education has been a more detailed look at how traditional and for-profit institutions differ in important areas like administration, instructor experience, mission and governance, data collection and use, and student recruitment and retention, writes Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman ...

Mayoral control and other popular remedies mistakenly focus on the faltering performance of school boards themselves and thereby fail to address the underlying dysfunction of an outdated Progressive approach to schooling, write Frederick Hess and Olivia Meeks in a paper for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. This approach reflects ...

A growing number of studies have demonstrated that private schools and many charters provide a much better civic education than public schools, notes David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame. This contradicts conventional wisdom that public schools are necessary to inculcate citizenship. Even so, he says, the right question ...

Schools can and should encourage a strong civic education, writes James Youniss of the Catholic University of America, and can also do so without indoctrinating children. He suggests three methods: informed, civil discussion and debate; student government with input into school management; and volunteering. Each approach is supported ...

Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline, documents Cory Koedel in an American Enterprise Institute study. The only reasonable explanation from this and other data is that education classes’ higher grades result from ...

Digital learning “unbundles” education so it can be customized for individual students, writes Frederick Hess for a Thomas B. Fordham Institute working paper. This flexibility also creates quality control challenges for families, schools, and states, who want to promote and ensure high-quality programs without squashing them. Hess ...

Over the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen dramatically. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, rising more quickly than market goods or services and outstripping the growth in family incomes. In his new study, Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to ...

The "whole school" approach to education reform has made it difficult for specialty education providers to get past bureaucratic rules and offer their services to parents, students, and teachers, write Frederick Hess, Olivia Meeks, and Bruno Manno in an American Enterprise Institute Outlook . "Unbundling" education means offering ...

One of schools’ biggest expenses currently is updating and building new facilities, but local budgets often do not have room to do this work, writes Himanshu Kothari in an American Enterprise Institute working paper. Private investors could be an excellent partner to offer what schools need, but they are often stymied by inconsistent ...

Despite hype and hope, turning around any failed institution is “an iffy proposition,” write Frederick Hess and Thomas Gift in an American Enterprise Institute policy study. Lessons from the business world, where turnarounds have a longer track record, suggest the many popular methods for doing so show no statistical record of ...

In an American Enterprise Institute working paper, Nathan Levenson offers practical solutions to tame out-of-control special education spending while serving special-needs students better. There has been a steady increase in special education spending along with remarkably little attention paid to effectiveness or efficiency. Levenson ...

Teachers may be setting too low a bar for what they expect students to know about American history and government, conclude Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett in a national, random sample survey of high school social studies teachers. Social studies teachers are also largely in step with public attitudes about the U.S. and its ...