Education Week, Part V: The Home Schooling Phenomenon

So far, our acknowledgement of National Education week has addressed the following topics. Part I looked at the deteriorating performance of government schools. Part II reviewed the evidence for school choice. Part III explained how government subsidies make higher education more costly. Part IV addressed the controversy over teacher compensation. Today, let’s look at home […]

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Education Week, Part IV: The Real Story about Teacher Pay

The worst policy research I’ve ever seen, over nearly four decades in the field, is the OECD’s grotesquely dishonest data on poverty (it even motivated a special page to acknowledge “poverty hucksters”). But this video from Andrew Biggs suggests that the Economic Policy Institute could give the OECD some real competition. This video exposing the […]

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Education Week, Part III: How Subsidies from Washington Are Making Colleges More Expensive and Bureaucratic

As part of National Education Week, I’ve looked at the deterioration of K-12 government schools and also explained why a market-based choice system would be a better alternative. The good news is that we have a choice system for higher education. Students can choose from thousands of colleges and universities. The bad news is that […]

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Education Week, Part II: The Case for School Choice

School choice is based on the simple premise that we’ll get better results if school budgets are distributed to parents so they can pick from schools that compete for their kids (and dollars). The current system, by contrast, is an inefficient monopoly that largely caters to the interests of teacher unions and school bureaucrats. Which […]

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Education Week, Part I: The Continuing Deterioration of K-12 Government Schooling

According to the union bosses at the National Education Association, November 18-22 is National Education Week and a “wonderful opportunity to celebrate public education.” I care about facts and I care about kids, and all the evidence shows that government schools do a terrible job. So, instead of celebrating, I’m going to focus this week […]

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Evidence for Charter Schools

I’m a huge fan of school choice. Simply stated, private schools deliver far superior results for children compared to costly and bureaucratic government schools. Moreover, given the way minorities are poorly served by the status quo, school choice should be the civil rights issue of the 21st century. But what about charter schools, which are […]

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Government Schools, the New York Times, and the Butterfield Effect

To help me follow policy developments, I get 30-plus daily emails from various news outlets and institutions, and I scroll through these messages to see what I should be reading. Given my interest in fiscal policy, I’m always on the lookout for articles on tax reform and the burden of government spending. But since I […]

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Elizabeth Warren’s Reprehensible Hypocrisy

If I had to identify the most economically destructive part of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s agenda, I’d have a hard time picking between her confiscatory wealth tax and her so-called Medicare-for-All scheme. The former would dampen wages and hinder growth by penalizing saving and investment, while the latter would hasten America’s path to Greece. By contrast, […]

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Fight over For-Profit Colleges Shows the Corrupting Influence of Federal Subsidies

The invaluable Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner is an expert at exposing the corruption of big government, and his article about for-profit colleges and government-subsidized tuition shows that everybody involved in this fight is sleazy. Unfortunately, no matter who wins, the taxpayers lose. It’s also worth pointing out that the main effect of government-financed […]

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