Tag Archives: events

Last night, the Education Policy Center team finished the last of its five school board candidate briefings at the Independence Institute in Denver. This year’s briefings have garnered a fair amount of attention from anti-reform folks, including some pretty interesting conspiracy theories. I am pleased to report that after talking it over with their evil right-wing overlords, the Ed Center’s staff members have been cleared to make the materials given to candidates publicly available. Not that they were really secret anyway; every school board candidate in the state was invited to the briefings regardless of his or her political opinions. All interested candidates had to do was sign a non-disclosure agreement, forfeit their firstborn children, submit to a lie detector test, and swear fealty to the Almighty Koch Brothers. No biggie, right? Now, though, everyone can see these top secret materials without having to go through all that stuff. Admittedly, that isn’t terribly fair to the candidates who had to directly endure the aforementioned requirements–particularly those who went through our patented microchip implantation process. But I strongly suspect that others will find the information valuable, and the Education Policy Center is all about providing valuable information to those who need […]

With a proposal in the state legislature, Georgia is having a debate right now over universal vouchers for K-12 students. The bill, sponsored by state senator Eric Johnson, would attach $5,000 to each child for their parents to select the public or private school of their choice. The debate over such a radical change makes events down in the Peach State worth watching closely: Will one state dare to make the leap to truly competitive, student-centered, customer-friendly public education? Are our schools foremost a jobs program for adults or a place to serve the needs of students? I think most parents and many teachers would choose the latter, but connecting that perception to constructing a more competitive system of consumer empowerment is easily lost in the heated rhetoric that inevitably follows the word “vouchers”.