The Heartland Institute

In this extensive report from the New America Foundation, the authors contend that in the past decade, states and school districts have designed new ways to expand and inform teachers’ use of data in K-12 classrooms. The shift is, in part, a function of the growing availability of student data. As a result of federal requirements ...

Maine’s governor has proposed a bill that would help send children from low-income families in Maine to board at public charter schools and allow students to take public money to private, religious schools that line up with state standards. Legislative Document 1529, sponsored by Sen. Garrett Mason (R-Lisbon Falls), expands the ...

While a $39 million education tax credit proposal failed to pass the South Carolina Senate this May, senators amended the state budget to grant tax deductions for private school teachers and learning-disabled students. The amendment allows individuals to deduct up to $10,000 in donations to private school scholarships for special ...

Friday's ed news Sources tell the AP a deal has been made to expand Wisconsin vouchers statewide . Meet the 13-year-old who, after years of trying, won the 2013 national spelling bee . Is Alaska bringing in Common Core through the back door? The battle rages in Kansas to defund Common Core before the legislative session ends ...

Wisconsin will tighten state regulations and oversight on voucher schools after State Superintendent Tony Evers received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice stating the program “must do more to enforce the federal statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the treatment of students with disabilities.” The letter ...

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin will consider a student privacy bill Oklahoma lawmakers passed by large margins this month. Its state-level protections are first of their kind in the nation, said John Kraman, executive director of student information at the Oklahoma Department of Education, and may provide a model for other states ...

Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults support Parent Trigger laws, which give parents the ability to petition for reforms at their children’s failing school, and 40 percent oppose such laws, finds a new poll. In urban areas, 57 percent of adults support a Parent Trigger law. California passed the first such law in 2010, and ...

Are schools collecting too much personal information about kids? The world has become an intensive data-tracking place, with grocery stores tracking your eating habits and Google tracking your internet history and search terms. Schools are no exception. Bluegrass Institute education analyst Richard Innes, an old hand at the inner ...

[ Below is an excerpt of Heartland Research Fellow Joy Pullmann's May 22, 2013 testimony before the Wisconsin Legislature's Joint Committee on Education in opposition to the state adopting Common Core education standards. For the full testimony, please click on the PDF link above . ] Common Core has never been pilot tested anywhere ...

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence discussed Indiana's lead in the school choice movement at a conference in Washington DC this week. School choice leaders across the country gathered at the American Federation for Children's annual policy summit. ...

The largest education company in the world put reading passages from its new Common Core-aligned curriculum into sixth- and eighth-grade tests it administered in New York, prompting concerns that schools who used Pearson materials gained a testing advantage over those that did not. This is the first year of New York’s new Common ...

Government preschool programs have expanded greatly in the past decade, but a new poll finds 57 percent of Americans believe parents, not the government, should pay for preschool. Thirty-two percent said taxpayers should pay for preschool in the Reason-Rupe May 2013 poll . “President Obama has proposed expanding government preschool ...

Friday's ed news Wisconsin holds a hearing on Common Core national education standards. The South Carolina Senate passes an education tax credit bill. In Texas , a charter school expansion and testing reduction bills become linked . While the public trusts teachers to know what's best for schools, teachers do what's best for ...

Two years ago Romain Bertrand was a middle school math teacher, finishing his fifth year teaching in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenberg district and thinking he needed a way to reach more teachers and students. He moved to a new position mentoring and coaching teachers, but professionally, he felt stuck. “This wasn’t going ...

In 1989, Wisconsin became the first state to implement school vouchers for poor families. The program began in the Milwaukee School District in 1990 and expanded to Racine School District in 2011. This spring, Gov. Scott Walker (R) and state lawmakers introduced proposals to expand these opportunities to more families throughout ...

Joseph Bast, President of the Heartland Institute, and Dr. Herbert Walberg, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Heartland Institute, discuss their book Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America's Schools on the 10 th anniversary of the book’s release. Image by the Center ...

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio has gone on the road to promote a federal tax-credit scholarship bill aimed at helping poor children attend private schools. The program is about “giving parents more choices,” he says. “This bill will incentivize investment in students and empower parents and K-12 students by allowing more educational ...

[ Below is an excerpt of Heartland Research Fellow Joy Pullmann's May 15, 2013 testimony before the Pennsylvania State Senate's Education Committee in opposition to the state adopting Common Core education standards. For the full testimony, please click on the PDF link above . ] Common Core supporters typically avoid two preliminary ...

MADISON – In January 2011, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett begged the state senate for legislation that would transfer control of vacant Milwaukee Public Schools real estate to the city of Milwaukee. State lawmakers passed a law allowing Milwaukee to sell unused school buildings without MPS approval. Two years later, the city struggles ...

Comedian Jay Leno periodically devotes a few minutes of his TV show to “jaywalking” segments, where he and his camera crew take to the streets and quiz passersby about basic historical facts. Most interviewees embarrass themselves by not knowing, for example, the name of the first U.S. president. Leno’s comical surveys hint ...