The Heartland Institute

Lawmakers in the Beaver State toppled a pillar of union protectionism when they eliminated teacher tenure in a bill signed by Democratic Governor John A. Kitzhaber on August 15. Under the new law, all current and new teachers will be employed on renewable two-year contracts. The law also directs the Oregon State Board of ...

Democratic Governor Froilan C. Tenorio has proposed a Parental Choice Scholarship Program for all 12,000 students in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a commonwealth of the United States in the far Pacific, with its capitol on the island of Saipan. The program would give a grant of at least $2,000 ...

On June 24, a group of ten teachers filed suit against the Washington Education Association for taking money from their paychecks without permission and using the funds to pay for the union’s political lobbying activities. The plaintiffs, calling themselves Teachers for a Responsible Union, are seeking to recover any unapproved ...

Dr. Anne C. Fox was elected the state of Idaho's Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1994. Her goals for Idaho public schools include accountability, raising education standards, teaching reading with phonics, upgrading technology, improving vocational education, and providing better pre-service teacher training. She is opposed ...

The country's growing private school voucher movement owes its birth and a large part of its success to J. Patrick Rooney, chairman emeritus of Golden Rule Insurance Company. In 1991, Rooney established a private voucher program in Indianapolis that has since blossomed into CEO America, a $40 million not-for-profit operation ...

African-American children in public schools are failing in record numbers, crippling their futures and limiting their careers. For some African-American parents, doing nothing about the problem was not an option. They are working with churches and community organizations to create their own schools, where their children can ...

Those familiar with the school reform movement, and with this newspaper, are keenly aware of the key role--sometimes positive, more recently quite negative--that teacher unions have played in school reform debates nationwide. Perhaps no one is more keenly aware of the unions' significance in these debates than Myron Lieberman ...

Twenty-five years ago, Marva Collins left a public school teaching position to open her own school, in her own home. Although she had enrolled her child in one of the city's private schools, she was dissatisfied with the education that was delivered there. Four years later, Marva Collins' Westside Preparatory School opened ...

Michael Joyce is president of the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Foundation is devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles, and values which sustain and nurture it. Under Joyce's leadership, the Bradley Foundation has been a strong supporter of PAVE--Partners ...

A proposal to create a charter school program in Washington State was defeated by a three-to-two margin on November 5, the victim of what its sponsors say was a campaign of lies and deception. Initiative I-177 In their description of I-177 for the voters, Educational Excellence Coalition co-chairs Fawn and Jim Spady ...

In 1996, six years after Milwaukee, Wisconsin implemented a school choice program that included private but not parochial schools, Cleveland, Ohio started the nation’s second major school choice program. The Cleveland plan gives low-income parents opportunity scholarships that can be used at both private and parochial schools ...

In a new report issued by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Dr. James J. Campbell, a Fulton, New York pediatrician, concludes that whole language reading instruction is responsible for a wide range of learning disorders. According to Campbell, whole language reading instruction is creating a group of children “so ...

As President Clinton prepares to take the helm of the nation in Washington, D.C. for another four years, a retired three-star army general has taken control over the “deplorable” public schools in that city. A report issued by a financial control board concluded that the school system in the nation’s capital “fails to teach ...

On October 18, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in a divided opinion that the state’s system for funding education does not violate the state’s constitution. “This court has specifically indicated that not every right secured by our state constitution is fundamental,” wrote Justice John Nickels for the majority. “While education ...

A new performance analysis of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s school voucher program has found that low-income minority students do better with choice. After three and four years in the program, those students scored three and five percentage points better in reading than their counterparts in the city’s public schools. In math, the ...

Nebraska voters on November 5 defeated two initiatives that promised property tax relief and more equitable funding of public schools. Their vote may have revealed a nationwide trend toward skepticism of “tax swap” schemes and higher spending on public education. The Nebraska initiative originally promised voters two things ...

On November 5, Pennsylvania voters improved the prospects for educational choice in the state by increasing the Republican majorities in both chambers of the state government. On January 1, 1997, the GOP majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives will increase by two, to 104-99. The party’s majority in the Senate ...

For more than a century, Vermont has practiced a unique school choice program called “tuitioning.”The practice arose because many small communities in the state did not have their own high school and were not members of high school districts. Those communities pay tuition for their children to attend public or nonsectarian ...

A new report on test scores designed to measure educational progress shows that the nation’s students lost ground between 1992 and 1994. Scores in reading and writing fell, while scores in math and science stayed about the same. The test scores were made available in October in a progress report on student performance ...