Research shows that technocratic reforms have made no difference in alleviating the achievement gap. A new study by Eric Hanushek et al. for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows that all the top-down fixes – No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc. – piled on by the education industrial complex have...

Led by the teachers unions, the push against standardized testing punishes kids. With bipartisan support in Congress and President Obama’s blessing, the son of No Child Left behind, dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), has become the law of the land. While many on the right favor the law because it returns some power...

Hope remains eternal — at least among those who want Congress to pass a reauthorized version of the No Child Left Behind Act being considered by the Senate this week. Even as the likelihood of passage remains as unlikely as it was back in March, when House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s...

Using testing as a backdrop, NEA president promotes 1950s industrial-style education. The American Enterprise Institute’s education policy maven Rick Hess has been traveling around the country promoting his new book The Cage-Busting Teacher. So last week he left his Education Week blog in the hands of National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García. Interesting choice,...

Teachers unions turn to “facts” as they desperately cling to their monopolistic, anti-privatization narrative. Last Thursday the “non-partisan” Center for Tax and Budget Accountability rolled out a report that slammed vouchers, claiming that there is “no statistical evidence proving that students who use vouchers perform better than their public school counterparts.” The “study,” as reported...

The deceptively innocuous-sounding name belies the crippling effects a centralized K-12 education curriculum will have on the United States once it is allowed to take effect. Ze’ev Wurman, software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert, feels Common Core is a federally-enforced “mediocre national benchmark” that “marks the cessation of educational standards improvement” and...

Regarding education reform, Romney needs to pound on the facts, leaving his detractors to pound on the table. Recently Mitt Romney laid out his education vision in a speech at the Latino Coalition’s annual economic summit in Washington D.C. The Republican candidate for president didn’t mince words. He said that we are in the midst...