The Heartland Institute

House Bill 1003 would lift a spending cap on Indiana’s voucher program and ditch a requirement that students attend public school for a year before becoming eligible. Although the program currently pays up to 90 percent of a high school student’s tuition, it limits the voucher to $4,500 for those in grades two through eight ...

Common Core State Standards for K-12 schools were adopted without debate by every state but Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia in 2010, part of the price of getting federal dollars under the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program. Now educators, parents, and policymakers are taking a closer look at what they agreed ...

Vocabulary is vital to learning in every subject, studies show. To get a more accurate view of U.S. students’ vocabulary, the National Center for Education Statistics adapted its vocabulary and reading comprehension assessment in 2009. The second round of results shows U.S. students have only a mediocre vocabulary. Vocabulary ...

The State Teacher Policy Yearbook provides detailed analysis of any and every state policy that impacts the teaching profession. The Yearbook is a 52-volume encyclopedia (51 state reports including the District of Columbia plus a national summary) produced every other year, measuring states' policies against a realistic blueprint ...

Friday's ed news: 1. Parents have pulled another Parent Trigger , this time in Los Angeles. 2. Indianapolis' reactionary school superintendent retires . 3. Minnesota may be poised to adopt revisionist history standards . 4. Pennsylvania schools losing students to charters are spending money not on improving but on ads to get the ...

One of the great privileges I have in working for Heartland is the opportunity to help elected officials at all levels of government discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to economic and social problems. Heartland realizes busy elected officials have little or no staff and need a reliable source of research ...

Hundreds of parents, grandparents, and children packed a January Indiana Senate hearing on a bill to remove the state from the Common Core, a national list detailing what K-12 students should know in every grade. State senators’ sentiments seemed mixed, but the audience leaned toward supporting Senate Bill 193. Approximately ...

January’s fiscal cliff deal delayed major cuts to federal education spending—at least until March, when mandatory cuts are slated to decrease it by 8.2 percent, or $4 billion. “While $4 billion is a fairly large number, there are a lot programs from which it can be taken,” said Michael Shires, an associate professor at Pepperdine ...

It’s a tale of two numbers: $2.9 billion and $9.6 billion. The first number, $2.9 billion, represents the reduction in education funding in the state budget for fiscal 2012-2013. The second number, $9.6 billion, represents the projected value of the annual oil and gas production in the State of Ohio by 2014 as a result of ...

Today at 1:30 p.m. ET, Indiana's Senate Education Committee will hear testimony on a bill to withdraw the state from the Common Core. The Common Core is a set of grade-by-grade requirements for what kids should know in math and English. Forty-five states have adopted it, and Indiana led in promoting and participating in it ...

In January, Congress voted to send an extra $100 million to Head Start, a few weeks after Department of Health and Human Services released its long-overdue evaluation of the federal preschool program, finding it has no benefit to children past first grade. Researchers finished collecting study data in 2008, but didn’t release ...

Public education has taken many forms over the last 300 years. Early in our history, public education referred to formal instruction in public settings outside the home. As public teaching became increasingly common in the latter half of the 18th century, communities began creating tuition-free schools that operated independently ...

Different increases in wealth among countries are strongly linked to student achievement. But in the most recent international achievement survey, U.S. students ranked 27th in mathematics and 21st in science. Seventy percent of our eighth graders can't read proficiently, and most never catch up. About 1.2 million students drop ...

Friday's ed news: 1. One in five Arizona students is now eligible for a voucher-like education savings account. 2. Learning basic math predicts SAT success, a new study finds. 3. College admission will get less competitive in the next decade because of fewer kids. 4. NYC schools spend $6,900 per student per year on busing . 5 ...

Will the rise of online learning undermine liberalism’s control over education? Lewis Andrews thinks so. He joins the School Reform News 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 ...

Wisconsin’s department of public instruction wants to charge taxpayers twice for the same thing: a big sum to indoctrinate teachers in “cultural sensitivity” and another $19,969 to tell how much that cost. Related training in Portland, Oregon cost taxpayers $526,901 and taught educators mention of common foods such as peanut ...

English teachers nationwide are puzzling over a math problem: How to include the right percentages of “informational text” new standards demand in their classes. In 2010, 45 states adopted the same lists detailing what kids should know in English and math at each K-12 grade. Although advocates promised uniformity would bring ...

The nation’s biggest school choice party will grow eight times bigger this year with thousands of events initiated and attended by tens of thousands of students, parents, teachers, and community leaders, said Andrew Campanella, president of National School Choice Week. “You can have a lot of whitepapers and research and polls ...

A coalition of advocacy groups has sued Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal to overturn a constitutional amendment 59 percent of voters approved in November. Constitutional Amendment One allows the General Assembly to authorize charter schools that have been denied by local school districts. Organizations including the Georgia School Boards ...

Missouri legislators are considering an education reform that has garnered significant national attention: the Parent Trigger. The legislation, first passed in California, has been considered in approximately 20 other states, and state legislators in four states have stated their intentions to propose it in early 2013. A Parent ...