Tag Archives: Jay Greene

Are Education Lobbyists Handing Out Cue Cards at the Colorado Capitol?

Jay Greene’s blog has a humorous – but sad – story of how New York City teachers union operatives were caught red-handed passing out cue cards (including one with a misspelled word) to City Council members. Because we really need school boards and other policy makers to do the thoughtless bidding of adult interest groups rather than stand up for the interests of children and taxpaying citizens, right? I’m obviously being sarcastic there. But seeing that funny post made me wonder whether cue cards recently may have been passed out at the Colorado State Capitol: What cue cards were given to legislative opponents who slapped down school choice twice in the same day? Who wrote the script for the lawmaker who needed help from Grover to distinguish public from private (another legislator raised the same question on another bill at another hearing)? Who authored the cue cards for the education committee chair to ignore critical findings about school employee pensions so he could grandstand with frivolous attacks? What lobbying interest group told the same committee chair to thwart the will of the people and double-super kill school spending transparency? Or perhaps these lawmakers came up with these bad, silly, arrogant, […]

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Secretary Duncan, Please Stop the Madness: Save the D.C. Scholarships

Okay, I’m throwing Legos again (sorry). I just can’t throw them far enough to hit Education Secretary Arne Duncan. First, he ignored and downplayed the positive results of the D.C. voucher program in helping to improve students’ reading skills. Now comes the insulting letter from the U.S. Department of Education that swipes opportunity away from untold numbers of poor kids in our nation’s capital. When will the madness stop? Liberal pro-Obama Fox News commentator Juan Williams shares the outrage. Check out this Cato at Liberty post to read what he had to say, and click on his picture to watch the video. Just so you know that we’re not alone (not nearly alone), Jay Greene also has been rounding up other responses to the Obama-Duncan hit on D.C. vouchers here and here and here. Not sure why this issue is so important? Listen to Virginia Walden Ford from D.C. Parents for School Choice about what’s at stake. Watch some of the D.C. scholarship students tell you themselves. There’s more, lots more out there. But I think I need to stop, give myself a timeout and go to my room so I can calm down.

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More Clarity Doesn't Give Arne Duncan Free Pass on Voucher Study Release

When I wrote yesterday with questions about Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s handling of the release of the D.C. voucher study, I didn’t necessarily expect such a fast answer. But former U.S. Department of Education official Russ Whitehurst has posted “Secretary Duncan Is Not Lying”. It’s a worthy read, and puts to rest the more extreme hypothesizing that Duncan knew about the positive results and intentionally hid them from Congress during the important debate on reauthorizing the program. While it seems clear that extreme case isn’t true, Jay Greene also rightly observes that other unsettling issues remain: Why did Duncan suppress the positive results in a Friday afternoon release with no publicity and a negative spin? Why falsely claim that the WSJ never attempted to contact him? The Secretary may well not be lying about his knowledge of the study but his credibility in general is very shaky right now. I’m too young to really grasp it all, but it seems politics lies at the center of the controversy. The D.C. voucher issue raises the specter of divisions within the Democratic Party and therefore causes some adults discomfort. But downplaying the results of the research doesn’t serve either the kids in […]

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Milwaukee School Choice Research Yields a Lot of Interesting Results

School choice doesn’t provide all the answers to our education challenges, but it’s becoming very hard to deny that choice in itself yields some positive results. Look at the new results (PDF) from the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Milwaukee isn’t just famous for that show about two women who work as brewery bottlecappers. The Wisconsin city is the granddaddy of school choice programs, and probably the best place for in-depth studies of all sorts of issues surrounding choice. And the School Choice Demonstration Project has brought together some of the best and most experienced education researchers – including Patrick Wolf, John Witte, and Jay Greene – to do just that. The series of studies released this week focus on everything from fiscal impacts to parental satisfaction to academic growth and real estate prices. Some of the more interesting findings:

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Colorado Charter-Friendliness Gets a B, As 41,000 Students Wait to Get In

I don’t know about you, but some parents give their kids money for getting certain grades on a report card. Not mine (at least they tell me they’re not going to), but that’s a different story. If Colorado were getting money based on how well it treated charter schools, how would it do? The Center for Education Reform‘s new report Accountability Lies at the Heart of Charter School Success says Colorado’s charter school law merits a B. Only eight states do better. Further, though our state’s charters receive significantly less funding than their other public school counterparts, their overall performance is commendable: In 2007, 74 percent of charters made federal accountability targets of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) while only 59 percent of conventional public schools did the same. Charter middle schools in Colorado are making the grade as well. In 2006, 55 percent of middle school charters were rated excellent or high by the state Department of Education, compared with 41 percent of conventional public middle schools.

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Temperature Rises in Georgia's Debate Over Universal School Vouchers

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”.

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K-12 Officials Blaming Special Education is Sort of Like Me Blaming Cookie Monster

Let’s admit it. None of us likes to take the blame, including the things we really are responsible for. And many times there are easy targets for those of us who like blame-shifting. One of my favorite education policy people, Dr. Jay Greene, put up a great post a couple days ago that is really worthwhile reading, titled “Blaming Special Ed”. In the post, he deconstructs the widely-held myth that special education is to blame for the lion’s share of increasing K-12 costs in recent decades: Blaming special ed is easy. Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims. Reporters simply accept assertions from school and state officials without question. Folks accept the blame-special-ed-story so easily because — well, to put it bluntly – it is a a widely held but unstated prejudice. People quietly resent special education because they fear that it is short-changing their regular education students. They assume that money spent on disabled kids is necessarily money taken away from general education. They can’t imagine that resources for general education have also increased at a very rapid clip even as special ed […]

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Thanks to Friedman, You Don't Need to Be Afraid of Any School Choice Myths

Over on Jay Greene’s blog, Dr. Greg Forster has a valuable update for those of us who want a handy place to go to answer all those objections to school choice: …the Friedman Foundation has released a set of “myth buster” guides to the research on the six most common school choice myths. For each myth they’ve provided a brief, handy reference sheet and a slightly longer, more detailed guide to the research. Even the detailed version of each myth buster is still less technical than the other lists on my “meta-list” page, compiled by Jay and other scholars, but it does go over the most important technical issues (how do we distinguish the impact of vouchers from the impact of other factors like family influence?) and provides the references you’ll need to dig further if you wish. Mythbusters, eh? I hear there was a movie made a long time before I was born. Seems it had this memorable song. I think we could rewrite some of the lyrics to fit the topic at hand: If you’re stuck at school in your neighborhood Who you gonna call? – Mythbusters! If the unions say school choice is no good Who you […]

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In the Corner of a Small Section Near the Far End of the Blogosphere

In a new Education Next article, Michael Petrilli gives a little primer on the education blogosphere – what he calls “the far end” of the long tail of the blogosphere at large. That makes someone like Joanne Jacobs, one of the more well-trafficked edu-bloggers, “a big fish in this small pond.” One way to measure the influence of blogs is by Technorati Authority, which simply tracks the number of different blogs that link to you in the past 180 days. Since I’ve been out there “watching” for more than 180 days now, I thought it would be neat to know where I stack up compared to Petrilli’s list. (Ironically, the article, intended for a non-savvy audience, is already out of date – or as Jay Greene puts it, “like so two months ago”. Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Blog wonders why his site was left off Petrilli’s list.) Anyway, in the world of the education blogosphere, it seems there are no education policy blogs in the top 10. Hmmm. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised by that. Anyway this small “top 10” section at the end of the long tail includes respected friends like Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts, the […]

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NewTalk's Star-Studded Discussion on the Future of No Child Left Behind

The times are changing in Washington, D.C. And that means federal education policy is on the table. What about No Child Left Behind? Should it be eliminated, or just modified? What is worth keeping, and what’s not? Starting today and going until Thursday, over at the NewTalk website, a group of education experts discuss the question: “Should we scrap No Child Left Behind?” The discussion is moderated by our good friend and prolific scholar Jay Greene. NewTalk is a project of the national legal reform group Common Good. Panelists include Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform, Neal McCluskey from Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek, and Elaine Gantz Berman from the Colorado State Board of Education. Take some time in the next couple days to head over and check out the discussion, which is sure to be thoughtful and lively.

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