The Heartland Institute

Discussions on school choice in Illinois are currently focused on the Rev. Sen. James Meeks' school voucher bill and the use of public funds to pay for children from failing schools to be educated in private schools. But the debate and proposals from legislators shouldn't stop there. School choice isn't just about vouchers ...

This Heartland Policy Study by education expert George Clowes addresses concerns about the efficacy of school vouchers that have been raised recently by some school reform advocates. The author distinguishes between “charity vouchers” and universal vouchers and explains why the former are unlikely to cause systemic reform of public ...

School choice is urgently needed to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity in education established by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and is “the civil rights issue of our generation,” declared longtime school choice advocate Clint Bolick at a National Press club event on May 17, the 50th anniversary of the 1954 ...

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The Founding Fathers don’t get much respect these days. In school, children are more likely to be taught that George Washington owned slaves than that he played an indispensable role in the creation of the Republic and in establishing its guiding principles. In the popular TV sitcom “The West Wing,” Washington’s Rules ...

Since 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has periodically conducted assessments to provide a report card on what the nation's students know and can do in various subject areas, and how these achievement levels are changing over time. As well as reporting achievement trends by subject by age and ...

Having fewer students per school is one of only three inputs found to have a positive impact on educational achievement, according to a statistical analysis reported in the latest issue of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Report Card on American Education . The ALEC study, published last October, is the latest in ...

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While recognizing that "class-size reduction has lately gone from being a subject of primary academic interest to a policy juggernaut," a group of international researchers last November recommended legislators consider lower-cost alternatives—such as attracting better teachers—"before they commit billions more on reducing classes across ...

Some policy analysts have claimed tuition tax credits for K-12 education are less likely to bring increased regulation to private schools than other reforms such as school vouchers. A recent study of the effects and consequences of the 1997 HOPE Scholarship Program for higher education effectively refutes such claims. In addition ...

QUESTION: For which grade level would the following test questions be appropriate? 1. Which of the following is equal to a quarter of a million? (a) 40,000 (b) 250,000 (c) 2,500,000 (d) 1 / 4,000,000 (e) 4 / 1,000,000 2. Martin Luther King Jr., [insert the correct choice] for the poor of all races. (a) spoke ...

While there is much debate over the cost, wisdom, and effectiveness of different strategies for increasing the amount of learning time available in the average school year--such as increasing attendance rates, lengthening the school day, cutting out recess, and lengthening the school year--little attention has been paid to how ...

At its annual convention in July, the National Education Association approved a resolution declaring its opposition to "federal requirements to make significant decisions about schools, teachers, or children based primarily on test scores." The union also voted to support legislation that would allow parents to let their children ...

A common attack on any kind of choice school--a school not owned and operated by the local school board--is that such schools are not accountable to the public and thus need to be more strictly regulated to prevent possible misuse of public funds. Choice critics insist any school that accepts publicly funded students ...

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First you learn to read, then you read to learn. But if you don't learn to read effectively, how can you ever read to learn effectively? Although research on reading instruction clearly and consistently shows that young children need systematic, direct, and explicit instruction in phonics to learn how to decode words on the ...

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