Category: Education

  • A Monopoly by Any Other Name

    What’s in a name? Apparently, to a government school monopoly, it’s everything. Last month, Pittsburgh Public Schools announced the district would be dropping the word “Public” from its name in order to avoid the negative connotation often associated with public schools. A paid marketing consultant helped develop the plan, which will also result in renaming…

  • Adjusting the Testing Gap

    In the July 25, 2006 Wall Street Journal Charles Murray has a commentary titled “Acid Tests” which describes how the way that the No Child Left Behind program uses test scores is misleading. Actually, misleading is too mild a word. The subtitle of Murray’s article is “No Child Left Behind is beyond uninformative. It is…

  • Curious Logic

    There’s something about our nation’s capital that converts many leading Democrats to school choice. But in most cases this extends only to their own children — not to the millions of children in failing public schools.

  • Bureaucracy vs. something that works

    Here’s how the education bureaucracy and teachers unions won out over students in the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act:

  • Market forces and teacher (mis)-education

    In a system governed by market forces, teacher pay would be based on how well students learn, not how many superfluous degrees teachers accumulate

  • Minimum wage price controls hurt Kansas

    This article presents compelling evidence that raising the minimum wage is not in the best interests of low-wage workers.

  • Adjusting the testing gap

    Charles Murray has a commentary titled “Acid Tests” which describes how the way that the No Child Left Behind program uses test scores is misleading. By adjusting what states use to measure “proficiency,” states can appear to be closing the gap between different groups of students. In Texas, the gap between the percentage of white…

  • Even the New York Times recognizes testing fraud

    A New York Times editorial titled “The School Testing Dodge” realizes that nearly all states report student achievement scores, as measured by their own tests, that are much higher than what the same students do on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress exam.

  • No Child Left Behind Leaving Many Behind

    Recently an Associated Press article reported how the test scores of some two million children aren’t being counted, due to a loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act. (See ‘No Child’ loophole misses millions of scores at CNN, April 18, 2006.)