Free Republic

In its coverage of the U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on President-elect Donald Trump's pick for education secretary, The New York Times’ headline read: “Betsy DeVos’s Education Hearing Erupts Into Partisan Debate.” To understand how politics took center stage in a hearing about education requires understanding the influence unions have on elections and the interests that Democratic politicians support. State and national public school employee unions have been among the most vocal critics of DeVos’s nomination because of her long history of supporting school choice. In addition to enabling parents to choose their own children’s educational path, choice undercuts the financial...

LANSING — One out of five students in Michigan takes advantage of school choice – mostly in the form of charter schools, public school district choice, homeschooling, or private schools. In 2015, school choice is part of this state's educational mainstream. This week is National School Choice Week. Across America diverse groups are celebrating the freedom of parents and guardians to choose where and how their children will acquire an education. In Michigan, the main event took place in Lansing. Students signing the school choice banner. Here is a photo slideshow of the activities. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy,...

In the last five months, Democrats in the Michigan Legislature have introduced 10 bills and two budget amendments that impose more oversight, reporting requirements, regulations, restrictions or an outright ban on charter public schools and the entities that authorize ("charter") them. The bills are part of an escalating battle over the extent which Michigan parents who can't afford or don't prefer private schools can still choose where to send their children to school. The bills come at a time when the number of charter schools in the state has expanded from 240 in 2009 to 303 in the current school...

A hot-button issue among educators appears to be “equitable access” to effective teachers, a buzzword at a recent event at the Center for American Progress (CAP). There was a brief introductory presentation of CAP’s research, in conjunction with the American Institutes of Research (AIR), on how to broaden minority student access to effective and high-quality teachers. AIR’s director of the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders, Angela Minnici, called for more data collection and plans on the state and district level. She pointed out that “Data is very important in this conversation” and said that “we’ve been talking about this...

In his newspaper blog, Battle Creek Enquirer reporter Justin Hinkley stated that because school choice doesn't provide transportation, low-income families often are unable to access choice while wealthier families take advantage and leave their home districts. "That's turned some schools into ghettos of poverty," Hinkley wrote. However, a 2013 study on Michigan charter public schools done by Stanford University, and a recently released study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy proves Hinkley's claim is wrong. The Stanford University study found that charter public schools had significantly more "economically disadvantaged" students than traditional public schools. Dev Davis, research manager at...

A Huffington Post article titled “Charter School Growth in Michigan Brings a Cautionary Tale on Quality” goes to great lengths to twist the overwhelmingly positive results of a new study of Michigan’s charter schools by Stanford University into something else. Here's a statistic the article's author, Joy Resmovits, picked out of the study: A CREDO study on Michigan released this week found that 80 percent of charters perform below the 50th percentile of achievement in reading, and 84 percent perform below that threshold in math. This observation appears on pages 35 and 36 of the study. As the study itself...

In a recent article in the Detroit Free Press, an education policy organization called Education Trust-Midwest expressed concern that taxpayers were supporting too many “failing [charter] school operators.” A focus on school quality for all schools is certainly needed, but Ed Trust’s analysis of charter public schools is short-sighted, unhelpful and risks creating negative unintended consequences. The Free Press reported that Ed Trust created a “cut score” for charter school quality based on the state’s “Top-to-Bottom School Ranking.” If a charter school performed better than 33 percent of the schools in the state, it passed; if it fell below this...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Wednesday that she would reimburse the government $88,000 for flights chartered from a company she jointly owns with her husband. McCaskill's office said she had not profited from the flights and that she was returning the money out of concern for how the arrangement might appear. "Sen. McCaskill has been very careful flying on taxpayer dollars," said Maria Speiser, a spokeswoman for McCaskill. "She has only paid for the use of her plane as required by the Senate rules, and there has been no profit to her or her family. She's glad there's transparency -...

A new report contains a sobering reality for would-be education reformers: Bad schools usually don’t get better. “After identifying more than 2,000 low-performing charter and district schools across ten states, analyst David Stuit tracked them from 2003-04 through 2008-09 to determine how many were turned around, shut down, or remained low-performing,” the Education Trust found. “Results were generally dismal.” “Seventy-two percent of the original low-performing charters remained in operation—and remained low-performing—five years later. So did 80 percent of district schools.” Despite the claims of proponents of No Child Left Behind, many children obviously were, even as federal outlays on education...

The metal bleachers in the middle of the school gymnasium fill slowly with expectant parents and playful youngsters. All of the adults are here on this warm spring afternoon for the same reason: to find out if their children will gain admission to South Arbor Academy, a Washtenaw County public charter school that has become so popular that it conducts a public lottery each spring to divvy up any openings in its K-8 program. Kindergarten is the most sought-after spot. The school has 77 seats available for the fall of 2010, but about 51 of those will be taken by...

D.C. Exports School Choice Bethany Stotts, November 3, 2009 This week Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, will be traveling to Kentucky to a rally supporting state legislation for charter schools. “Ford brings her message the ‘parents deserve a choice so kids can have a chance’ to Louisville this Friday,” states the Bluegrass Institute press release. “She will speak at a rally on Friday at 7p.m. in the multipurpose facility at Midwest Church of Christ, 2115 Garland Ave…..” Walden-Ford has fought hard for the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provided vouchers for underprivileged students attending the...

OTTAWA -- Canada's six NHLteams are scrambling to find alternative travel arrangements south of the border after the U.S. Department of Transportation banned Air Canada's charter fleet from flying between U.S. cities. In a furious exchange with the Obama administration over the mid-August ruling, Canada has launched its own investigation and will soon close its skies to U.S. sports team charters in retaliation, warns Transport Minister John Baird.

Nearly two decades have passed since the enactment of the landmark Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by the Wisconsin legislature. The program and its many supporters had hoped this experiment in school choice would lead the way in transforming American schools. But it is by now clear that aggressive reforms to bring market principles to American education have failed to live up to their billing. It is time to find out two things: What happened? And what comes next?