Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Education reform'

Education as liberation: 4 priorities for reform

With the recent appointment and confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, the movement for educational choice has plenty of reasons for optimism. Throughout the nomination process, opponents of DeVos ridiculed the school-choice movement for caring little about quality, equality, and opportunity, ignoring that these are the precise drivers of advocates for school choice. Continue Reading...

Private Schools for the Poor

One of the popular targets of foreign aid is education, and understandably so. Yet as with most solutions sprouting from Western planners and do-gooders, the reality on the ground is a bit different than we typically imagine.  Continue Reading...

Education Reform: We’re Doing It Wrong

In this American Enterprise Institute Vision Talk, Chancellor of DC Public Schools Kaya Henderson talks about the state of public education reform. She says we have the opportunity to change everything we’ve been doing wrong in education for the past 100 years, but we are failing at the task. Continue Reading...

Thinking Small To Make Big Changes

Stephen Dubner, one-half of the Freakonomics team, knows that tackling big issues can big problems, and that’s often why big issues (think: poverty) don’t get solved. Dubner’s thought? Think small. Don’t try to solve everything; solve one thing. Continue Reading...

Explainer: What is Common Core?

What is Common Core? The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics. Continue Reading...

Disestablishing Our Secular Schools

When it comes to public education, racial bias has not been acceptable for almost fifty years. So why is religious bias still tolerated? If we really want to promote religious liberty and educational reform, says Charles L. Continue Reading...

Grading Kids by Race?

In his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Continue Reading...

Common Core: Homogenizing Schools and Our Children

Politicians and public educators seem to constantly revert back to status quo arguments of further centralization as a way to reform education failures in the U.S. The most recent push for uniformity in the public school system is the Common Core, a set of national assessment standards and tests that has been adopted by 45 states and will be implemented possibly as soon as the 2014 school year.  Continue Reading...