Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : There should be a "road of opportunity" for every kid

January 31, 2013 | By JONATHAN WOOD

The New York Times has a story about the closing of the private primary school that Justice Sotomayor attended as a child.  The Justice was quoted in the story, making an eloquent case for school choice. You know how important those eight years were?  It’s symbolic of what it means for all our families, like … ...

Articles

Delta smelt remand extension denied

January 31, 2013 | By DAMIEN SCHIFF

Yesterday, Judge Lawrence O’Neill, Judge Wanger’s replacement in the Delta smelt cases, denied the joint motion of the feds and the California Department of Water Resources to extend by several years the existing deadline for these agencies to produce a new Delta smelt biological opinion to govern the Central Valley and State Water Proj ...

Articles

To the government, skin color is all that matters

January 31, 2013 | By JOSHUA THOMPSON

In October, when Fisher was being argued before the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia was concerned with how the University of Texas determined it had “enough” minorities in each classroom.  He asked, “how does the University determine when classrooms are diverse? …  Do they go about, classroom by classroom, deciding how man ...

Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : open the Gates!

January 30, 2013 | By TIMOTHY SANDEFUR

Bill Gates, writing on CNN today, argues that schools could be improved by adopting the “Measures for Effective Teaching,” a project that would “develop reliable measures to identify great teaching.” No doubt teachers, like everyone else in the world, can do their jobs well or badly, and should be subject to some kind of eva ...

Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : Thousands of opportunities to get involved

January 30, 2013 | By JONATHAN WOOD

The School Choice Week website has a helpful database of public events during School Choice Week.  There are thousands of opportunities for supporters of school choice to get involved, including events in every state except South Dakota.  (Incidentally South Dakota has no school choice program.  Something like a tax-credit program would be a � ...

Articles

A Compact for America?

January 30, 2013 | By TIMOTHY SANDEFUR

Compact for America is an organization seeking to generate support for a balanced budget amendment in an interesting way: establishing an agreement among the states to convene a limited constitutional convention for the purpose of adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The Constitution allows states to hold amendment conventions, a ...

Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : Enabling the choice to home school

January 29, 2013 | By TONY FRANCOIS

Last week my colleague Joshua Thompson posted on New Hampshire’s recently enacted school choice law, passed by the legislature over the governor’s veto.  Using the constitutionally validated means of providing tax credits for donations to school tuition organizations, Section 77-G:2 I(a) of the law allows tuition organizations to provi ...

Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : How is your state doing?

January 29, 2013 | By JOSHUA THOMPSON

Our friends at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice have this fun interactive map detailing the school choice options available in all 50 states.   Check it out to see how your state is doing. … ...

Articles

School Choice Week 2013 : School choice on trial in Texas

January 29, 2013 | By CHRISTINA MARTIN

School choice was on the witness stand in this case out of Texas that I blogged about last fall. A school choice group called TREE is asking the court to declare the Texas school system unconstitutionally “inefficient.” As part of that lawsuit, the Heartland Institute’s Joseph Bast testified that a private scholarship program fun ...