DC's Office of the State Superintendent of Education seems to be turning into an obstructionist bureaucratic backwater. Jay Mathews raised the alarm in a column this week that OSSE is holding back data that could shed light on testing improprieties at DC schools. This is just the tip of the...
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The Denver Post recently analyzed the cost of taxpayer subsidies to teacher unions in the 20 largest districts in Colorado and found they added up to more than $1M per year. In many places across the country, school districts pay some or all of the salary and benefits of union...
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Although state tax collections are on the rise, and have returned to 2008 levels in many places, education advocates shouldn't kid themselves that the "new normal" of flat budgets and tough resource allocation decisions will soon come to an end. Spending on health care entitlements continues to grow rapidly, according...
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State Rep. Matt Huffman is trying to build support for a promising effort to expand private school vouchers to more working-class families in Ohio. In order to appease recalcitrant school districts, whose executives vocally oppose the measure, he may remove any benefit youngsters in wealthier districts could hope to get...
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As I was reading Richard Vinen's op-ed about Margaret Thatcher from this weekend's New York Times, I couldn't help but think of Florida's beleaguered governor. Rick Scott ran as a staunch Tea Partier dead set on getting public spending under control, cutting $1.35B from the state's education budget last year....
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Charged up by our governance conference last week, Dave DeSchryver says we should open the black box of school finances and shine some much needed light on how school dollars are really spent. This kind of accountability, with some easy-to-use tools along the lines of Mint.com, is sorely needed as...
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Two-thirds of schools in the UK were closed for a day recently as teachers went on strike over proposed changes to pensions. Unions are trying to force the government's hand during negotiations over contributions to the pension system, which has become unaffordable (there as here in the US) due to...
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A major impediment to improving outcomes for disadvantaged children in the nation's schools is misallocation of the more than $600 billion we spend annually on K-12 education. Marguerite Roza from CRPE and Cindy Brown from the Center for American Progress brought up this very point at our governance conference this...
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Zachary Janowski at the Yankee Institute has an interesting take on school efficiency in Hartford, CT:
Ten Connecticut school districts can produce two high school graduates for the price of one Hartford high school diploma, according to Department of Education data.
The most recent 13 years of education, representing kindergarten...
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Protestors on UC campuses in California are focusing attention on the rising cost of higher education in the state's public university system, which has seen cuts in state support of over a billion dollars. A Berkeley administrator sums up the concern:
“The rapidly rising fees give us all heartburn,” said Gibor...
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