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Center for Education Policy |
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Dear Colleague,
Welcome back. We are excited to share the latest from The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
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School Choice Soon Available to Half of US Kids, But How It's Designed Is Critical
The Daily Signal, Jason Bedrick
School choice will soon hit a tipping point. If Texas enacts a universal school choice bill, as seems very likely, then more than half of K-12 students nationwide will be eligible for private school choice. Already this year, three states—Idaho, Tennessee, and Wyoming—have enacted new universal education choice policies or expanded existing ones to make all...
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Teachers Unions Oppose Reintroduction of Phonics
The Daily Signal, Jonathan Butcher and Emma Horn
For decades, K-12 schools have wandered away from a time-tested, research-based method of teaching reading: phonics. Student scores have plunged to historic lows, but some states are turning back to the practice of teaching letter sounds—if teacher unions do not spoil the efforts first.
Phonics instructs children to identify letters and their pronunciation to construct words, supplying the tools needed to tackle combinations of letters. “Cueing” and its related methods, such as...
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Real School Accountability Puts Families First
The Daily Signal, Jason Bedrick
Arkansas has been a national leader on education freedom, but a bill before the state Legislature would be a step in the wrong direction. In 2023, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed into law the Arkansas LEARNS initiative, an ambitious education reform package that expanded education choice, restructured teacher compensation to pay more for...
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The Trump Administration Has an Opportunity to Promote Quality Civics
The American Mind, Adam Kissel
As the Trump Administration pushes DEI out of schools and colleges, it should incentivize patriotic civic education as a salutary alternative. While curricular mandates from Washington violate federalism—besides the views of the growing chorus of Americans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—many federal tools remain...
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Teachers' Unions Bent the Education Dept. to Their Will -- Shut It Down to Throttle Their Power
New York Post, Jonathan Butcher
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is “really angry” that President Trump wants to close the U.S. Education Department. And no wonder: The AFT and its sister union, the National Education Association, have reaped the benefits of the agency’s steady growth since 1980—so calls to close it directly threaten both unions’ bottom line. Every increase in Washington’s education spending helps union causes. For so many problems with the American education system, unions will...
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Be Not Afraid -- School Choice Will Benefit Texas Children
ArcaMax, Jason Bedrick and Ed Tarnowski
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and scaremongering that school choice will destroy public education. Whenever a state legislature considers a measure to create a new education choice policy, the proverbial Chicken Littles inevitably start squawking that the sky is falling.
Take Texas’s proposed K–12 education savings account (ESA) policy. Texas legislators are considering a bill to create ESAs, which would allow families to use...
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Higher Education Commentary
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Fixing the Biden DOE's Legendary List of Abuses
RealClear Education, Adam Kissel
Nicholas Kent, nominated for Under Secretary of Education, has a significant opportunity to help the Department of Education overcome the lawlessness of the past administration. This is because the under secretary oversees both the leadership of the Office of Federal Student Aid and the regulations that gatekeep access to student loans, which have suffered many losses in...
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Columbia's Egregious Public-Relations Campaign
City Journal, Jason Bedrick and Tal Fortgang
The Trump administration is making an example of Columbia University. Widely regarded as the American campus most prone to violent and disruptive anti-Israel activism, the school has seen $400 million in federal grants revoked, and a noncitizen graduate now faces deportation for “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Columbia’s response to these actions, in turn, is setting a precedent—offering a glimpse into how elite institutions may...
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Dismantling the Education Department
The Daily Signal, Adam Kissel
Conservatives have been working to correct President Jimmy Carter’s mistake ever since he made federal education programs into a Cabinet-level agency. For decades, Republicans have said they wanted the U.S. Department of Education abolished as billions of dollars have been spent at the federal level, yet student test scores have steadily declined. Now, President Donald Trump is really starting to...
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No, We Don't Need the Department of Education After All
ArcaMax, Lindsey Burke
The death knell is sounding for the Department of Education—and progressives aren’t happy.
If predictions hold true, the Department of Education may be in its final days. Indeed, sources suggest President Donald Trump will soon release an executive order ultimately intended to eliminate the department in its entirety—or at the very least significantly downsize...
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Heritage Experts in the Media
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Reports from Heritage Experts
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The Conservative Vision of Education
Ryan Anderson, Ph.D.
Now is the time to go on offense in offering a compelling vision about the truth of the human person. Most parents want that for their children, and our nation needs it. America needs students who know and love the good, the true, and the beautiful. It needs students who form real friendships, intellectual friendships, moral friendships. It needs students who love their country, their home, and who are ready to serve—to serve neighbor, country, and God. That’s the conservative vision of education.
Read the full report here.
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The Professor Racket: How Universities Could Reduce Poor Teaching and Shoddy Research
Jay P. Greene, Ph.D.
Academia has slowly become a racket in which professors do not work very hard and focus too often on unproductive and low-quality research. The general public is becoming increasingly aware of this racket and is losing confidence in universities, threatening the large public subsidies required to sustain the current structure of higher education. The public realizes that quality teaching is more socially useful than the avalanche of uncited and obscure research that tenured and tenure-track professors have been producing. Refocusing professors on teaching by increasing teaching loads and reducing faculty headcounts must be on the agenda for any university planning on sustaining itself over the long term.
Read the full report here.
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Educating the American Citizen: Changes in Schools as Assimilators of Immigrants
Lindsey Burke, Ph.D., Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Adeline Kaufman, Isabella Vennare, and James Shuls
Schools are increasingly abandoning their mission as assimilators of immigrants because education elites no longer believe in that mission. But parents and the American public still do. The best way to strengthen schools as assimilating institutions is to shift power from education elites toward parents. If parents have access to school choice, allowing them to find public or private options that best fit their values, those schools will reflect the preferences of parents rather than those of the education establishment that trains teachers and administrators.
Read the full report here.
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Homeschooling, Homesteading, and the Renewal of American Citizenship
Rachel Alexander Cambre, Ph.D.
Far from merely withdrawing from modern social ills, homeschooling and homesteading actively work to heal them. In part because the home is no longer the primary place of work, school, or social gatherings for most Americans, it is typically thought of as a private retreat away from the “real world,” where the obligations of citizenship recede as personal concerns take center stage. But such a conception overlooks the formative role that is proper to the home. When centered as the locus of family life, the rightly ordered home can serve as a school for citizenship, offering lessons in self-government, voluntary association, and patriotism.
Read the full report here.
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Last Chance to Apply is April 11th!
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For more information on how to apply, click here!
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