Sparking the evolution of education choice
Editor’s note: This article from Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, appeared recently on edweek.org. You can listen to a podcast with reimaginED executive editor Matt Ladner and Great Hearts Online executive director Kurtis Inforf here. Great Hearts Academy launched in[Read More…]
Editor’s note: This commentary from Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, originally appeared on the Institute’s web site. It is a truth so obvious that it scarcely needs to be said: successful businesses have satisfied customers while unsatisfied customers take their business elsewhere. It’s true of[Read More…]
In the American film classic “The Blues Brothers,” a pair of musical misfits accept a mission from God to save the orphanage where they grew up. Desperate to raise money, they impersonate a country and western band only to have the crowd boo and throw bottles against the chicken wire[Read More…]
Jay Greene and James D. Paul gathered data for a new study for the American Enterprise Institute released Sept. 22 demonstrating that Democrats in state legislative chambers have only rarely made the difference in passing original private choice legislation nationwide. The authors make the case that choice supporters have erred[Read More…]
If you wanted to determine, tomorrow, if your child was on track in reading or math, where would you turn? What if you wanted to know how your child was doing in a particular math concept, like the Pythagorean theorem? There are some companies that exist for such purposes, like[Read More…]
In the vision laid out by their strongest supporters, education savings accounts have the potential to revolutionize public education, giving parents direct control of funding and allowing them to assemble customized educational programs for their children, buying services from private schools, public schools, home-school curriculum providers, and more. Plain-vanilla school choice could[Read More…]
A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute, which we highlighted here, argued burdensome charter school applications were creating needless barriers for new schools. Critics, including some charter school authorizers, pushed back, saying the report went too far, and that its recommendations would weaken charter school oversight. Since then, Mike McShane,[Read More…]
Charter schools were first conceived as a bargain. Teachers (or, in the case of some of Florida’s oldest and most successful charters, parents) would receive the freedom to start new schools and experiment with different educational models. In exchange, they would face greater accountability for their academic results. That bargain is[Read More…]
