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The Arizona centered BASIS charter school network sweeps the top five national high school rankings in the US News & Reports Annual Ranking. BASIS charter schools have no admission requirements and openly accepts students based on a random lottery system due to the high demand for the public charter school.

This week is National Employee Freedom Week and there is certainly reason to celebrate! On June 27, 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court released hundreds of thousands of non-union public employees from the burden of paying agency fees via the Janus v. AFSCME decision.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Barbara Kurshan and Dr. Rachel Ebby-Rosen define innovation ecosystems as a network of partnerships between educators, students, businesses, entrepreneurs, and researchers that is “constituted by the individuals in those institutions, their ties to one another and the resources they exchange.”

After nearly ten years of service, education leader Tom Boasberg has resigned from his role as superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS). Under his leadership DPS has thrived and gained national attention and respect.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, instituting school choice in New Orleans has helped enliven and rebuild education and has reinforced proof of the effectiveness of charter school management. A new study provides an analytical breakdown of post-Katrina education reform and presents insight into the positive effects of school choice in a new light.

The Supreme Court of the United States today dealt a major blow to public sector employment unions. At issue was whether public sector unions are permitted to withhold fees, without consent, from employees who do not want to join the union. The specific law at issue in the case is an Illinois law that allowed public sector unions to withhold what is called an “agency fee” from nonmember employees. The idea is that where a union has been recognized as the exclusive bargaining unit, it has the responsibility to represent all employees during collective bargaining, whether member or not. Thus, the agency fee, which amounts to a specified percentage of the normal union dues, is justified—or so the argument goes—because the nonmember employee is receiving benefits of representation. The Supreme Court disagreed.

Colorado’s charter schools are no rookies when it comes to setting school choice standards–so it’s no surprise that the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) charter school network received this year’s Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, an award given to the country’s best public charter school network.

Remember the teacher walkouts this spring? Senate Bill 18-200 was one of several reasons why the teacher unions held rallies at the State Capitol Building. Learn more about the bipartisan legislation that Governor Hickenlooper has signed into law and read two very different views on its impact.

The newly released paper Rethinking Regulation by Michael McShane is a fundamental analysis of the effects regulation has on the rapidly evolving school choice market. Rethinking Regulation emphasizes the basic economic effects of deregulation and expounds the regulatory process that controls our educational system.

Once again, Colorado’s charter public schools have ranked in the top of their class and continue to set the precedent for what school choice can achieve.