School Reform News Podcast The Heartland Institute

The executive president of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions is under fire for the revelation that her eldest son attends a private school. Teachers unions universally oppose school choice programs that include private schools, and in doing so they deny education opportunities to children whose parents cannot afford to pay for them to leave the deteriorating public schools. This is an especially troubling problem in nearly all the nation’s big cities, where the public schools are plagued by poor student achievement, disorderly behavior in classrooms and other facilities, disastrous teaching methods based on ridiculous fads, and politicized curricula. Denisha Allen, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and founder of Black Minds Matter, joins School Reform News to discuss this problem.

The other day, Heartland Institute Editorial Director Chris Talgo, was on the Rod Arquette Show in Salt Lake City, Utah to talk about the pathetic results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The nation’s report card found that only 13 percent of 8th graders are considered proficient in US History. 
 
Chris is a former U.S. History teacher in the public schools of the Chicago Suburbs and a small town in South Carolina. That was almost a decade ago, and even back then Chris was shocked at how little his students knew about American history. And now the results are even worse.
 
Why is it getting worse? Chris explains in this excerpt from the Rod Arquette show. Have a listen.

Heartland's Tim Benson is joined by Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation, to discuss Heritage's new Education Freedom Report Card. They chat about the report's methodology, which states ranked highly and which states ranked poorly, and the information and lessons it can provide both parents and policymakers.

Today on the Heartland Daily Podcast, Senior Editor Joe Barnett talks with former state Rep. Kent Grusendorf, who is a long-time education reformer. They discuss the unprecedented support for universal school choice legislation and the impacts victories by parents in recent school board races has had.

Grusendorf explains how support for school choice has never been higher. Parents want to see their dollars going towards funding their child’s education, not funding a school which fails them.

Today on the Heartland Daily Podcast, Senior Editor Joe Barnett talks with Texas Political Consultant Craig Ownby about a recent 'nonpartisan' school board election in Mansfield, Texas that saw the election of four conservative candidates opposing leftist supporters of critical race theory. Barnett and Ownby also discuss the prospects for school choice in Texas.

In this episode of the School Reform News podcast, Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by Adam Tyner, associate director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to discuss Fordham’s new report, America’s Best and Worst Metro Areas for School Quality. Find out how they quantify their rankings, whether the "best" public schools have the highest achievement, which metros fared well, and which metros fared poorly.

Check out the interactive report here: https://metro.fordhaminstitute.org/