The Heartland Institute

Residents of five diverse, fiscally stressed states have similar priorities for state government, but their preferences clash with budget realities and show distrust of their governments, says a new report by the Pew Center on the States and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). The report is based on surveys of ...

New concerns about the ramifications of President Obama s health care law are arising as state policymakers realize the law may decrease health care access and push more patients into already overcrowded emergency rooms. Potential doctor shortages were already a pressing issue before ObamaCare, and now more hospitals and critics ...

Charter schools have finally caught on in America s smallest state, but charter advocates in Rhode Island say state regulators seeking to impose a double standard on the publicly funded but independent schools risk stifling growth and innovation there. Motivated by the lure of federal Race to the Top dollars, Rhode Island lawmakers ...

Demand by low-income families in Florida for education scholarships skyrocketed this year, causing officials to stop accepting new applications for the state s tax credit scholarship program. The tax credit has proved popular in the Sunshine State with enrollment almost tripling in the last six years from 10,549 students during ...

Sheila Weinberg was not surprised to learn the Securities and Exchange Commission had accused the State of New Jersey of securities fraud. We found New Jersey to be the worst by far of the 50 states when it comes to accounting transparency for liabilities for pension and health insurance benefits for government workers and ...

It's hard to know where the fairy tale of " green jobs" first came from. It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes ...

Residents across five diverse, fiscally stressed states have similar priorities for state government, but their preferences clash with budget reality, according to a report released by the Pew Center on the States and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). The report is based on surveys in Arizona, California, Florida ...

Funding for New Mexico s 80 charter schools is under scrutiny by the state education department as state legislators weigh difficult budget cuts. Schools across the Cactus State are facing a 3 percent across-the-board reduction in funding for the 2011 fiscal year. But charter schools could face greater restrictions if legislators ...

A coalition of five New Jersey Democrats has filed legislation to expand choice for students and parents in the Garden State by making it easier for more charter schools to open. The proposal establishes an additional charter school authorizer, expedites approval of charter school applications, and allows new types of charter ...

Certain school districts across the United States are doing exceptionally well at raising the academic achievement of African-American male students, a new study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education reports. But in singing the praises of monopoly public schools the study may overstate the successes of students in New ...

As schools struggle with cyberbullying and other student-on-student abuses in and out of the classroom, a coalition of more than 70 civil rights, religious, education, professional, and civic activist groups is urging federal officials to step in with sweeping action including a law to make bullying a federal crime. The Leadership ...

Texas is one step closer tapping the state’s education trust fund to aid charter schools in securing permanent facilities. The state legislature and Texas attorney general are reviewing a new policy the state Board of Education narrowly approved over the summer, which would authorize the state to buy or construct new schools ...

The North Carolina Parent Teacher Association is becoming less popular among parents but more popular among politicians. North Carolina parents are leaving the PTA by the thousands, opting to form independent parent teacher organizations. Some are fed up with the PTA’s political involvement—it partners with teachers unions to lobby ...

Vermont tops the states when it comes to test scores but ranks at the very bottom in school reforms, while Florida earns a solid B+ for its sweeping and sustained reform efforts, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s report card on American education . ALEC’s report card, now in its 16th year, offers a ...

New Jersey Education Commissioner Bret Schundler has become a high-profile casualty of Race to the Top. Gov. Chris Christie (R) announced Friday that Schundler, the former Jersey City mayor and outspoken proponent of school choice, has been fired because of the poor explanation the state gave for an error on its federal grant ...

The Wisconsin Supreme Court dealt a blow to the budgetary manipulations of Gov. Jim Doyle (D) and the Wisconsin legislature when it ruled their $200 million raid on a medical trust fund was unconstitutional. The fund was established by state law in 1975 to help control increases in medical malpractice insurance premiums for ...

Most Americans do not want federal-government bureaucrats seizing the education reins from the states, according to the latest Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll on public attitudes toward education (http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/docs/2010_Poll_Report.pdf). The poll also found widespread public anxiety about school funding, as state and local ...

Starting this fall, Hawaii s students won t need number two pencils when they take the state s reading and math proficiency tests. Aloha State schools are going digital. In addition to switching from traditional pencil-and-paper tests to an online format, schools will have the option of letting students take tests up to three ...

The next fiscal year could be a perfect storm for North Carolina budget writers, according to an analysis by the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, which ranks the Tar Heel State s budget gap as the fifth-worst in the nation and worst in the Southeast. Congress has passed a rescue package that would cover ...

As the national unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and out-of-work individuals struggle to find jobs, government employment continues to climb in 18 states, according to the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. Private-sector employment for the nation as a whole fell by 6.9 million jobs between the December 2007 ...