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The Wall Street Journal is out with a video editorial discussing the Parent Trigger on it’s first birthday—and the Heartland Institute’s contribution to chronicling and explaining the parent empowerment law.
At about the 1:48 mark, David Feith and Jason Riley discuss (but don’t name outright) this recent Heartland Policy Study on California’s experience with the Parent Trigger.
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The Heartland Institute’s Herb Walberg, who is also the chairman of Heartland’s board of directors, was a guest on “Free Markets with Dr. Mike Beitler” on the Voice America network a while back. (Listen to or grab the MP3 at the bottom of this post.)
Mike talked with Herb about education reform and his latest book Advancing Student Achievement, which you can check out here.
Herb, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, talked with Mike in October 2010 — but it’s just as relevant now because the school-reform movement continues to gain steam, particularly with the Parent Trigger revolution. If you are at all concerned about reforming our public schools, this probing and intellectually stimulating conversation is worth a listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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We couldn’t be prouder of our own Bruno Behrend, who recently drove up to a Tea Party Rally in Sheboygan, WI (otherwise known as “real America”) to talk about school reform — getting the crowd excited about breaking up the government education complex.
Have a look and listen:
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The massive success of voucher program expansion by intrepid legislators this past year in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio has commentators in nearby states begging their own legislators to share the love.
This recent report from the Allegheny Institute in Pennsylvania responds to criticisms of voucher programs, such as that they send money to religious schools and take money from local public schools. The report documents how the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled voucher programs constitutional, how states save money, and parents and kids benefit from better education options.
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Politico has tracked the IP address of a website attacking former D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to the American Federation of Teachers.
The site, which refers to Rhee as “the Sarah Palin of education” among other things and is the main online source of attacks on Rhee, was launched in February. An tracking tool traces the IP address back to the AFT’s offices in D.C. The site has since jumped to several other IP addresses.
Coming on the heels of an accidentally released-and-then-pulled document explaining the AFT’s strategy to quash the Parent Trigger in Connecticut, we see a clear emerging pattern of aggressive, anti-reform and anti-family empowerment actions by a teachers union that purports to show a friendly hand to education reform.
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CLICK IMAGE TO SEE TAXPAYERS' SAVINGS GRANTS VIDEO
Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast was on “Wall Builders” with Rick Green Monday talking about the Taxpayers’ Savings Grants in Texas. As usual, Joe knocked it out of the park.
Some highlights of what Joe said in the 27-minute clip (which you can hear or download via the player at the bottom of this post):
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to schools. So why do we assign kids to a single public school based on where their parents live? When it’s pretty obvious that these kids have different skills, different interests, their parents have different interests. … We ought to be able to allow parents to be able to sort their kids into the schools that they think would do the best job education their kids and the current system just doesn’t allow that to happen. …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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The Wall Street Journal reports on thousands of black Harlem parents rallying against…the NAACP. Why? Because the NAACP has joined a lawsuit with the local teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, to stop New York City from closing 22 of its worst schools. The article is currently gated, so here are some of the pertinent points.
[A]t the Academy for Collaborative Education, one of the Harlem schools that the city wants to close, only 3% of students were performing at grade level in English last year, and only 9% in math. At Columbus High School in the Bronx, another school slated for closure, the four-year graduation rate in 2009 was 40%, versus a citywide average of 63%, and less than 10% of special education students graduated on time.
The teachers union wants to keep these abysmal schools open to preserve jobs for their members. This is bad enough. But the union and NAACP also want to limit better educational options for low-income families who can’t afford private schools and can’t afford to move to an affluent neighborhood with decent public schools. The union knows that in a place like New York City, where space is at a premium, blocking charters from operating in public buildings will hamper charter growth.
We don’t need more proof that the NAACP has moved from civil rights underdog champion to indifferent protector of a broken status quo—an ironic tragedy for an institution now a banner carrier for attitudes it once attacked.
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In several states—Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan—new Republican majorities through both statehouse chambers and the governorships have created momentum for proposing and enacting education reforms previously impossible. Other states, however, have split houses or splits between governors and the legislatures, and this has come to mean many aborted reforms.
Nevada is just one example, though legislation is facing the same struggles in states like Minnesota: Gov. Brian Sandoval introduced a series of education reforms now becoming common fare: lengthening the time for teacher tenure from one year (!) to three, requiring written evaluations for teachers, end “first in, last out” layoffs, a constitutional amendment to allow vouchers, require school districts to develop open enrollment policies, a merit pay pilot program, and more.
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I just finished a conversation with Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma on the state’s nation-leading set of school reforms Gov. Mitch Daniels signed into law in early May. The interview will be online in about a week (listen and subscribe in iTunes here), but until then, here’s a preview of Bosma’s remarks concerning lessons he’s learned from the historic state session.
As background, do remember that Indiana House Democrats fled the state to prevent these school reforms and labor-related legislation from moving forward in the Republican-controlled statehouse. They were gone for five weeks at a hotel in Illinois, refusing to return the House to quorum until Bosma and Republican leaders met their demands on curtailing or eliminating these bills entirely.
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Many people embedded in education reform acknowledge its bipartisan nature—mostly because the American system is so bad not even the willingly blind can help but bump into it. Add Joel Klein, NYC’s former schools chief now inventing education technology at Rupert Murdock’s News Corp., to the list of middle-roaders too sick of the stench to not shout for help.
His recent (and lengthy, but worthwhile) piece in The Atlantic offers thunderous proof of, well, what we at The Heartland Institute have been telling you for decades:
According to a Department of Education internal analysis, the average NYC teacher works fewer than seven hours a day for 185 days and costs the city $110,000—$71,000 in salary, $23,000 in pensions, and $16,000 in health and other benefits.
I’ve had normal, middle-class Americans tell me teachers “work just as hard as any farmer.” Perhaps some teachers do—family members and friends who teach prove the profession still does have a few hard workers, somehow—but clearly not in New York. And, I suspect, elsewhere.
Another shameful anecdote:
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