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Policy Studies
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Education
Charter Schools: A Welcome Choice for Parents
By Jason Richwine, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 09/02/2010
A study published by the Department of Education (DOE) in June, “The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts,” highlights the many benefits of charter schools. The results show unambiguously that parents are substantially more satisfied with charter schools and the academic and social development of their children who attend compared to public school parents.
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Education
Good Classroom ‘Disruption’: Use the Internet to Expand Educational Options in Rural School Districts
By Terry Stoops, John Locke FoundationSpotlight, 08/26/2010
North Carolina has the infrastructure to expand online course offerings significantly. An average of 99 percent of North Carolina classrooms in rural districts have an Internet connection. Moreover, there is a statewide average of 2.43 students per Internet-connected computer. While statistical tests would need to confirm a causal relationship, districts that enroll few students in online courses generally have a higher per-pupil expenditure than those that enroll a higher number of virtual school students. This report offers several recommendations, including: Introduce virtual charter schools; expand online course offerings from private and for-profit companies, community colleges, and universities; and develop off-site high school campuses.
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Education
Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education
By Jay P. Greene, Goldwater InstitutePolicy Report, 08/19/2010
Enrollment at America’s leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. But unlike almost every other growing industry, higher education has not become more efficient. Instead, universities now have more administrative employees and spend more on administration to educate each student. In short, universities are suffering from “administrative bloat,” expanding the resources devoted to administration significantly faster than spending on instruction, research and service.
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Education
Grading Schools
By Matthew M. Chingos, Michael Henderson, Martin West, Education NextEducation Next, 08/19/2010
Never before have Americans had greater access to information about school quality. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), all school districts are required to distribute annual report cards detailing student achievement levels at each of their schools. Local newspapers frequently cover the release of state test results, emphasizing the relative standing of their community’s schools. Meanwhile, new organizations like GreatSchools and SchoolMatters aggregate this information and make it readily available to parents online. But do all these performance data inform perceptions of school quality? Or do citizens base their evaluations instead on such indicators as the racial or class makeup of schools, regardless of their relationship with actual school performance?
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Education
Reforms with Results: What Oklahoma Can Learn from Florida’s K-12 Education Revolution
By Matthew Ladner, Oklahoma Council of Public AffairsResearch Papers, 08/11/2010
Florida lawmakers began a comprehensive education reform effort in 1999 combining accountability, transparency, and parental choice with other far-reaching changes. In March 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released new results showing just how successful Florida’s reforms have been and how futile Oklahoma’s efforts have proved. This study documents how the latest NAEP results strengthen the case for Florida-style reforms. In 2009, some groups of traditionally underperforming students from Florida—including that state’s Hispanic students—widened their leads over the statewide average score for all Oklahoma students.
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Education
Success from the Sunshine State: When Illinois Schools are Failing, It’s Time to Copy Florida’s Winning Strategies
By Collin Hitt, Ashley Muchow, Illinois Policy InstituteEducation Brief, 08/10/2010
Florida has given more and more school choices to its families, especially to those with limited means, those whose children might be stuck in a failing school, and those who have children with special needs. Sunshine State policymakers are unafraid to give tough grades to schools that allow some students to languish behind their peers. If young students are reading far below grade level, Florida law keeps them from advancing to a higher grade where they will fall even farther behind. Online learning is a common element in Florida homes and classrooms. And, thanks to the state’s multiple routes to teacher certification, established professionals are allowed to move into teaching careers. The state’s schools are on the rise, primarily because of their solid progress with low-income, disadvantaged and minority students – progress made possible through sound state policies.
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Education
Pay for Performance in the Pittsburgh Public Schools: Will It Pay Off?
By Eric Montarti, Allegheny Institute for Public PolicyReport, 08/09/2010
The Pittsburgh School Board’s Committee on Education accepted a $40 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support implementation of its plan to improve the District’s teachers. A key component of the plan is the concept of tying teacher pay to student achievement, known as pay for performance or merit pay. A radical concept that faces stiff opposition from national and local teacher unions, the PPS board and administration raised the possibility of pay for performance a year before it won the foundation grant. Now with a new five year contract agreement with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers in place we can see how the proposal looks. This report examines the concept of pay for performance, its prevalence nationally, and how it has been adopted in the PPS.
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Education
Actual Pay: A Survey of Missouri Public School Superintendent Salary and Benefits Package
By Audrey Spalding, Show-Me InstitutePolicy Study, 08/06/2010
This Paper addresses a topic that has received little systematic study: the compensation of school superintendents. Missouri school districts spend roughly $9,500 per student in current operating expenses. Superintendents, with the approval of their boards, make important decisions about how these resources are allocated. So, how are these education decision-makers compensated? Which superintendent and district factors explain differences in superintendent pay? To get a fuller picture of compensation, Audrey Spalding made sunshine requests to all Missouri school districts for superintendent contracts. These contracts provide important data about other benefits that superintendents receive, including the use of cars, additional annuities, vacation time, bonus pay, etc. The information is included in the analysis.
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Education
Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time
By Philip Babcock, Mindy Marks, American Enterprise InstituteEducation Outlook, 08/05/2010
In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.
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Education
Collective Bargaining and School Performance
By Terry M. Moe, Hoover InstitutionDefining Ideas, 08/03/2010
Since the publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk, a watershed report that warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in America’s schools, public officials have been under intense pressure to improve academic performance. They have responded with billions of additional dollars and with a commitment to reform that has persisted for a quarter century. The focus has been on academic achievement, but there has been great concern as well for closing the “achievement gap” between white and minority children and for improving the large urban districts that many minority students attend.
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Education
Challenging the Sensitivity Gestapo
By Frederick FicoSeptember 09, 2009
The trajectory of my career changed in late 2006, although I could never have recognized it at the time. A tenured full professor of journalism at Michigan State University, I was sitting in my office when a student dropped by and identified himself as the chairman of the MSU College...
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Education
School Reform That Can Work
By Frederick M. Hess and Thomas GiftJanuary 16, 2008
Year in and year out, education reform shows an earnest tendency to paint by numbers. Those seeking to improve schools latch onto the familiar litany of "best practices" and hot new instructional techniques, asserting that if only administrators identified and implemented the right set of prescriptions, successful reform would cascade...
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Education
Multicultural Education: Unifying or Divisive Force?
By Robert HollandMay 01, 2004
The multicultural movement has had a profound effect on how schools teach United States history. The state of the curriculum in Illinois and Chicago provides a case in point. Recently, Sheldon Stern, historian at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, graded the standards of 48 states on...
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Education
The Stuff of Kids’ Dreams
By Clint BolickApril 01, 2003
The Supreme Court ruled last summer that the school-choice program in Cleveland is constitutional. This is a great victory for America’s children, especially those children from poor and minority backgrounds who benefit the most from school choice. But while we chalk one up for freedom, we should not forget how...
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Education
Voucher Wars: Laying the Groundwork
By Clint BolickApril 01, 2003
The modern case for school vouchers was first made by the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, who introduced the concept of “vouchers” into the American lexicon. Acknowledging that Americans would not support the government’s getting out of the education business altogether, Friedman advocated the next-best thing: instead of providing education...
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Education
What's Next For School Choice?
By Todd Gazanio and Krista KaferJuly 01, 2002
In a long-anticipated ruling, on June 27 the Supreme Court upheld the Cleveland school choice program against a federal constitutional challenge and made it extremely unlikely that any such challenge could prevail against similar choice programs in the future. In its landmark opinion, the Supreme Court removed one of the...
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Education
Implementation Watch: Students’ Rights Under the No Child Left Behind Act
By Krista KaferJune 01, 2002
States and school districts must implement the school choice provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act (P.L.107-110) at the beginning of the new school year. Some states and school districts will go the extra mile to ensure that students in failing schools have many options from which to choose....
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Education
Landmark v. The NEA
By Mark R. LevinNovember 01, 2001
Landmark Legal Foundation's five-year investigation of the National Education Association, and subsequent legal action, is a powerful reminder of the value of persistence and hard-work. It is also an impressive example of how conservative activists can pro-actively and effectively counter established, entrenched, and well-funded opposition. Introduction In the 12 years that...
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Education
Rediscovering Liberal Education: A Case for Reform in America’s Universities
By Stephen H. BalchJuly 01, 2001
The modern American university is the product of confidence: confidence in its concrete utility, and confidence in its service to freedom and democracy. Concrete utility has mainly been the product of the university’s scientific/technological establishments, and the research and training facilities they embody. Freedom and democracy have been the province...
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Education
The Portsmouth Declaration: A Call for Intellectual and Moral Excellence in Schooling
April 01, 2001
On January 25-26, 2001, The Link Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting content and character in the classroom, convened a group of scholars to discuss a path-breaking article by Dartmouth College Professor James Bernard Murphy, entitled “Good Students, Good Persons.” Asking the question: “what is education?” and looking at...
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