The Heartland Institute

Compton, California seems an unlikely place for black and Latino parents to unite for fundamental education reform. But the Los Angeles area city known best for its political corruption, racial division, and gang violence is the first proving ground for California s Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the parent trigger. A ...

In an effort to ease financial pressures on the state budget, Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs is suggesting the legislature replace the current cap of 22 students in each K-4 classroom with a maximum average of 22 students for the entire district s K-4 classrooms. Texas faces a combined $27 billion budget shortfall for ...

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is asking voters to extend a sales- and income-tax increase for five years to help close a $25 billion state budget deficit this year and spare the state s public schools from deep budget cuts. However, education policy analysts at Stanford and Pepperdine University dispute claims by Brown and ...

A key New Jersey state Assembly panel has cleared the New Jersey Opportunity Scholarship Act, a bill to aid low-income students in the state s worst schools. The vote sets the stage for a contentious floor fight over the bill even though it has bipartisan support. The Commerce and Economic Development Committee unanimously ...

Indiana Democrats are balking at votes on several labor and school reform bills winding through the state legislature. Despite a walkout, in which some House members reportedly fled to adjacent Illinois, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and Speaker of the House Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) say they remain optimistic the proposals will ...

The Kentucky state Senate has passed a bill opening the state to charter schools, overcoming opposition from the state s teachers union and culminating nearly a decade of work by school reformers in the Bluegrass State. Senate Bill 3 would establish a state charter authorizer. The bill also would permit parents to send their ...

California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and his staff say the state s groundbreaking parent empowerment law may be too vague for the state department of education to write clear regulations. Torlakson announced at the state board s February meeting he was forming a working group with Assemblywoman Julia Brownley ...

In November 2010, voters around the United States demanded change in Washington. For the third time in as many election cycles, Americans kicked out people in power and replaced them with new, often untested elected leaders. Two months later, in January 2011, many men and women came to Washington having campaigned on promises ...

Children with disabilities are often poorly served by public schools. In 1999, Florida created a school voucher for children with disabilities called the McKay Scholarship Program. This program allows children with disabilities to take a portion of the funding the state would spend on their education and use it at any school ...

States that embraced Race to the Top reforms but didn t receive a piece of the $4.35 billion in federal grant money are weighing whether to keep the reforms. About 40 states passed legislation raising charter school caps, establishing new teacher performance evaluation criteria, purchasing data management systems, and authorizing ...

Problem According to The Heartland Institute s 2010 State School Report Card, North Carolina public education ranks 47th in the nation in terms of Learning Achievement and receives an F. Currently, North Carolinians have little say in how their schools are improved and no ability to authorize the creation of a charter school ...

Without question, Gov. Jerry Brown has the right to make his own appointments and craft his own policies. But his picks for California s powerful state board of education could jeopardize one of the most innovative and empowering if controversial education reforms to come along in years: The parent trigger that gives parents ...

Writing in the Wall Street Journal , my friend and longtime former coauthor Diane Ravitch challenged resurgent congressional Republicans to return K-12 education to local control and to repudiate and reverse the nationalizing tendencies of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core standards, etc. Appealing to the GOP ...

Given a choice, about half the voters in six states would either send their children to a private school or educate them at home, a new survey by the Foundation for Educational Choice finds. The survey of 600 registered voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Jersey, and New York is the latest in a series of ...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) says the state should expand its trailblazing school choice programs to cover all children in the Sunshine State, not just low-income and disabled students. Scott, who took office Jan. 4, surprised Florida s education establishment in December when he told 900 voucher recipients at a St. Petersburg ...

The Kansas State Board of Education (KSBE) voted to make the Sunflower State one of the last states to adopt the national Common Core State Standards Initiative. These standards were designed by a state-led effort put together by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School ...

A special panel advising the Connecticut State Board of Education is considering a money follows the child approach as part of a broader reevaluation of how the state funds public schools. At stake is full tuition for approximately 28,300 Connecticut students who attend magnet schools or public schools outside their home districts ...

Experience, Oscar Wilde observed, is simply the name we give our mistakes. I was reminded of Wilde s maxim while watching the recent Cathleen Black drama play out in New York City. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, tapped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the city s public schools chancellor, has no experience in education ...

Medicaid is the joint federal-state program that funds health care for low-income Americans. Since its creation four-and-a-half decades ago, Medicaid spending has accelerated out of control, largely because of the formula for transfers: the federal government must pay at least 50 percent of a state s Medicaid costs. This creates ...

Post-secondary students who take online distance learning classes outperform their peers who work face-to-face with teachers in a physical classroom, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching . The study by Mickey Shachar and Yoram Neumann could aid efforts to extend learning opportunities ...