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In April we addressed the Think Tank Review Project.  Then Nancy Salvato took a swing at the group.  Now Checker Finn breaks out the brass knuckles.  Excerpt: We at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation always thought it passing strange that so opinionated a group would set itself up as impartial arbiters. After all, TTRP is […] Read more »

Looks like LAUSD shot itself in the foot chest of late.  From the LA Daily News: Would Superintendent Roy Romer, or some other ranking LAUSD official, care to explain why, exactly, the district needs the services of an expert in public relations and political campaigns? The Los Angeles Unified School District has a monopoly over […] Read more »

QandO looks at old school organizations (MSM and politicians, among others) dipping a toe in the blogosphere and notes this: Surprisingly — to me, anyway — Think Tanks have been relatively slow to take advantage of the blogosphere, and relatively unsuccessful when they do. The Cato Institute has recently moved into the blogosphere and they […] Read more »

Good for a laugh.  Read more »

Villaraigosa pitched his takeover plan to the teachers’ unions yesterday.  Predictably, they sounded, shall we say, less than enthusiastic: "I don’t doubt his commitment, but I feel as a relatively new mayor that there are so many other things on his plate," said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which adopted a […] Read more »

George Mason University economics department chair Donald Boudreaux describes the economic behavior of public schools: Government K-12 schools, as now run everywhere in the U.S., will never excel at educating students. The reason is that each school gets its students and its budget without having to compete for them. Imagine if, say, supermarkets were run […] Read more »

Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial: "The biggest revolution caused by No Child Left Behind is the revolution in education research," says Georgia State University’s Gary Henry, a scholar in educational policy and evaluation. "We are getting better at figuring out what works. But what we are seeing is almost nothing that has a very large effect." Even […] Read more »

We spotted this over the weekend: I called a lobbyist and asked him for a number: how many of the 212 members of the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate send their children to private schools? These are the people who make the rules for the public-school system. As the state […] Read more »

Back in February, Bill Gates called high schools "obsolete".  It seems some students agree with him: It is a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland idea. If you do not finish high school, head straight for college. But many colleges — public and private, two-year and four-year — will accept students who have not graduated from high school […] Read more »

Andrew Rotherham and I are out to prove everyone wrong by demonstrating that it is possible to have a civil debate about school vouchers, in this case, school vouchers for children with disabilities. Read more »