By: Dave Myslinski
Over the weekend, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) rejected an anti-Common Core bill, thus completing its 18-month exploration of the Common Core State Standards. This action reaffirmed ALEC’s position that states should be in charge of their education standards and supports the option for states to freely adopt Common Core. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Mike Thomas
Now I understand all the protests over Oklahoma’s school grading system.
It is very misleading, although not for the reasons cited by the school superintendents. The state awarded 160 schools an A and only 9 got an F?
This is more than a 10-1 ratio of excellence to failure. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Dr. Matthew Ladner
So the Heritage Foundation just released these fantastically illustrative charts documenting Baumol’s Disease in American K-12 education. The first shows that total employment in public schools increased by ten times more than enrollment growth, with non-teaching staff leading the way with an incredible 138% increase: Read the rest of this entry »
By: Mike Thomas
Florida will be the first state to litigate the effectiveness of education reform.
State Board of Education member Roberto Martinez calls it “an exercise in futility and madness and a waste of funds.”
All of which might disqualify it from other arenas, but certainly not a court of law.
Opponents of education reform filed a 2009 lawsuit accusing the state of violating a state constitutional amendment by not adequately funding a “high-quality’’ school system.
The Florida Supreme Court recently gave them the go-ahead to proceed. Read the rest of this entry »
By: Mike Thomas
It seems that support for an A-F school grading system is contingent on the rigor of the grading system.
The harder it is to get an A, the more pushback there is from the public school bureaucracy and opponents of education reform.
They would prefer we grade schools like we graded kids on my second-grade soccer team: Everybody gets praised for effort. Everybody gets a trophy! All the parents are happy. Read the rest of this entry »
There is some question about whether Florida lawmakers will make another attempt to pass a parent trigger law next year. The measure narrowly failed in the last legislative session because of a tie vote in the Senate.
The Florida Education Association and its allies in the Florida PTA and Fund Education Now led the charge against parent trigger, calling it an assault on public education. Read the rest of this entry »
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